I have been developing microservices (Spring Cloud) for a while (~2 years) and heavily used Netflix Zuul. While it offers a lot of functionalities and great features, my developer mind wandered towards knowing about the alternatives and came to know about Tyk and Kong.
Reading from the individual documentation and blogs, I understood more or less both offer the similar features. I would like to know a comprehensive comparison between the two and any real-world examples where you have implemented will be a great help understand.
Today, Kong Gateway is by far the most widely used open source API gateway in the world across different metrics. First, Kong today powers the world with approximately 9 trillion requests per month, a number that we derive from the anonymous reports that users can enable (or disable) in their Kong instances.
The Kong Server, built on top of NGINX, is the server that will actually process the API requests and execute the configured plugins to provide additional functionalities to the underlying APIs before proxying the request upstream. for proxying. This is where Kong listens for HTTP traffic.
Kong easily integrates with existing GraphQL infrastructure out of the box. By introspecting the GraphQL schema and queries, Kong provides enterprise-grade proxy-caching and rate-limiting specifically tailored for GraphQL.
According to CI/CD both can comply with Infrastructure-as-Code approach, so i do not see difference in terms on Deployment Pipeline practices.
On the other side, the API of Kong has limited functions and terminology IMHO is not understandable: https://galileo.gelato.io/docs/versions/2.0.0/
So based on your needs, if any of your needs matches with one of the above, you can consider tyk, if not you can consider whichever you like more...
Go with Tyk. I evaluated both and it was much easier to extend (imho) Tyk (go) due to its Javascript (via otto), Python and Grpc middleware engine, than Kong which is Lua/nginx based.
Both are open source and controllable via APIs, however kong's gui offerings (other oss projects) seemed half-baked and were much harder to setup.
From an enterprise/sass model (paid for options). Tyk blows Kong's offering's off the map. Tyk's architecture seems much more sound imho with a clear separation of concerns for gateways, analytics and dashboard components. Its well put together and the community forums get lightning fast responses from the Tyk devs.
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