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This article introduces the knowledge of "how to choose a micro-service API gateway suitable for you". Many people will encounter this dilemma in the operation of actual cases, so let the editor lead you to learn how to deal with these situations. I hope you can read it carefully and be able to achieve something!

What is the purpose of the microservice API gateway?

Let's first take a look at the role of the microservice API gateway. The following figure is a brief illustration:

API gateway is not a new concept, which existed more than ten years ago. Its main function is to handle business-related requests uniformly as an entrance to traffic, so that requests can be processed more safely, quickly and accurately. It has the following traditional functions:

Reverse proxy and load balancing, which is consistent with the location and function of Nginx

Dynamic functions at runtime, such as dynamic upstream, dynamic SSL certificate and dynamic current limit and speed limit, which are not available in the open source version of Nginx.

Upstream active and passive health checks, as well as service breakers

Expand on the basis of the API gateway to become a lifecycle API management platform.

In recent years, business-related traffic is no longer just initiated by PC clients and browsers, but also from mobile phones and IoT devices. In the future, with the popularity of 5G, these traffic will increase more and more. At the same time, with the structural changes of micro-service architecture, the traffic between services will also begin to grow explosively. In this new business scenario, more and more advanced features of the API gateway have emerged:

The cloud is natively friendly, and the architecture needs to be lightweight and containerized.

Interfacing with Prometheus, Zipkin, Skywalking and other statistical and monitoring components

Support for gRPC proxy and protocol conversion between http and gRPC to convert a user's http request into an internal service gPRC request

Assume the role of OpenID Relying Party, connect with the services of identity authentication providers such as Auth0 and okta, and treat traffic security as a top priority

Serverless is realized by dynamically executing user functions at run time, which makes the edge nodes of the gateway more flexible.

Do not lock in users and support hybrid cloud deployment architecture

Finally, the gateway node should be state-independent and can be expanded and reduced at will.

With more than ten functions mentioned above, a micro-service API gateway can make users' services only care about the business itself, while the functions that have nothing to do with business implementation, such as service discovery, service breakout, identity authentication, current limit and speed limit, statistics, performance analysis, etc., can be solved at the independent gateway level. From this point of view, the API gateway can not only replace all the functions of Nginx to handle north-south traffic, but also complete the role of Istio control plane and Envoy data surface to handle east-west traffic.

What are the alternative API gateways?

It is precisely because the micro-service API gateway is so important that it has always been in a competitive position. Traditional IT giants have had a layout in this field for a long time, such as Google, CA, IBM, Red Hat, salesforce, and public cloud vendors such as AWS and Aliyun.

These closed-source commercial products are fully functional, covering the full lifecycle management of API, such as design, multilingual SDK, documentation, testing and release, and provide SaaS services. Some of them are integrated with the public cloud, which is very easy to use, but also brings two pain points:

Platform locked. API gateway is the entrance to business traffic. Unlike CDN-accelerated non-business traffic such as pictures and videos, it can be migrated at will. API gateways are bound with a lot of business-related logic. Once a closed-source solution is used, it is difficult to migrate smoothly and cheaply to other platforms.

Can not be secondary development. General large and medium-sized enterprises will have their own unique needs, need custom development, at this time you can only rely on manufacturers, and can not do their own secondary development.

So we prefer open source API gateway solutions, such as Kong, APISIX, Trk and so on. These API gateways are selected from the panorama of the Cloud Native Software Foundation (CNCF):

Compare the deployment and maintenance costs of type selection

Can it be fully deployed on a single machine, or do you need the cooperation of multiple nodes to use it?

Is there an external database dependency? Such as MySQL, Postgres?

Is there a web console that can operate the entire cluster?

Open source or closed source

Can you write your own plug-ins to extend the functionality of the API gateway?

When you use an API gateway, can you migrate to other API gateways smoothly and cheaply?

Will it be locked on a specific platform?

Can the deployment be privatized?

Does it support deployment in the user's own internal server?

Does it support the deployment model of multi-cloud and hybrid cloud?

Function

Whether the basic functions such as dynamic upstream, dynamic SSL certificate, active / passive health check are supported

Can you dock with Prometheus, Zipkin, Skywalking and other statistical and monitoring components

Whether the gateway configuration can be controlled through HTTP REST API and yaml configuration files

Community

Can users contact community developers through Github, QQ groups, Stack Overflow, etc.?

Are open source licenses friendly?

Is it easy to submit your own changes to the mainline version?

Is there a commercial company behind it?

Business support and prices

Is there a big difference between the open source version and the commercial version?

Is the commercial version charged according to the number of API calls or subscriptions?

API Gateway comparison

The following is the comparison of various API gateways from different angles:

API Gateway

Kong

APISIX

Trk

Apigee

AWS

Aliyun

Deployment mode

Stand-alone and cluster

Stand-alone and cluster

Stand-alone and cluster

Stand-alone is not supported

PaaS

PaaS

Data storage

Postgres

Or

Cassandra

Etcd

Redis

Postgres,Cassandra and Zookeeper

PaaS

PaaS

Whether it is open source

Apache 2.0 protocol

Apache 2.0 protocol

MPL

Agreement

No

No

No

Core technology

Nginx+Lua

Nginx+Lua

Golang

Unknown

Unknown

Unknown

Private deployment

Yes

Yes

Yes

No

No

No

Custom plug-in

Yes

Yes

Yes

No

No

No

Community activity

High

High

High

Medium

Low

Low

Docking external IdP

No

Yes

No

Yes

Yes

No

Support for yaml

Yes

Yes

No

No

No

No

We can see that Kong and APISIX are both very good choices.

This is the end of the content of "how to choose your own micro-service API gateway". Thank you for your reading. If you want to know more about the industry, you can follow the website, the editor will output more high-quality practical articles for you!

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