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Comment by khaledtaha | Hacker News Reader

Have you found any viable alternatives to Kong?

Not OP, but we are using Tyk (tyk.io) at my workplace. It's definitely more user friendly than Kong, but we've had other issues with it. Having not used Kong extensively but knowing what it is, I'll go out on a limb and say Kong is likely more performant.

Actually it should be the opposite. Definitely do your own benchmark, but take a look at the latest numbers from Tyk and compare it with the latest numbers from Kong to get a general idea.

This analysis was done by BBVA comparing Tyk and Kong performance https://www.bbva.com/en/api-gateways-kong-vs-tyk/ - disclosure: I work for Kong, but Kong (the company) had no involvement with the benchmarking in that article.

The benchmarks for Tyk here seem somewhat off - it doesn’t look like it was set up correctly for production use.

Those BBVA benchmarks look very very wrong. BBVA achieved 3822 requests per second with a 16Gb server running Tyk.

I used a 16Gb Digital Ocean box, and a separate box to run benchmarks from.

Tyk CE with keyless api.

docker run --rm williamyeh/wrk -t4 -c100 -d1m --latency --timeout 2s http://10.131.45.89:8080/tykbench/get Running 1m test @ http://10.131.45.89:8080/tykbench/get 4 threads and 100 connections Thread Stats Avg Stdev Max +/- Stdev Latency 5.79ms 6.97ms 206.76ms 87.28% Req/Sec 6.35k 0.93k 10.89k 74.33% Latency Distribution 50% 3.19ms 75% 6.28ms 90% 15.93ms 99% 31.14ms 1516573 requests in 1.00m, 185.13MB read Requests/sec: 25244.99 Transfer/sec: 3.08MB

As per above results, I got 25,244 requests per second. 90% of requests were served with sub 15ms latency.

Another thing - you can freely scale with Tyk CE as much as you want at no-cost. I currently run 3 gateways in prod and it doesn't cost a penny. The BBVA article states that you need to pay Tyk to scale - simply not true:

>However, if we want to deploy a significantly larger number of microservices, or simply ensure high-tolerance to failure, we need to scale up the number of gateways. In the case of Kong, all it takes is adding a new node and connecting it to the database. With Tyk we can do the same, although it will require us to pay for the service. This could be a determining factor when choosing what API Gateway to use.

I went through process picking API gateway about 3 months ago. Tyk is not without it's warts, but has far more out-of-box features baked in (inc distributed rate limiting) than Kong. And if custom plugins are required, I can choose between lua, python, js or anything that supports gRPC. With Kong - stuck with Lua.... no thank you.

I guess my point here is that if Tyk not performant enough for you, just add another gateway. And if I need custom functionality - I don't need to learn Lua.

Used Tyk with a similar experience. Generally very happy with it but the documentation was, at the time, a bit challenging.

Hey Bob - you'll be pleased to hear Tyk took that feedback on-board. There is now very comprehensive documentation and user-guides. And true to the Open Source approach, anyone can contribute to them, the community have been great in working to improve them.

The "service mesh" space is starting to take off now with the rise of Kubernetes and containers.

Bouyant made LinkerD and now Conduit: https://buoyant.io/

Lyft created Envoy: https://www.envoyproxy.io

Istio uses Envoy for more functionality in K8S: https://istio.io

So far we're still using Kong. Planning an upgrade soon. But we try to avoid shifting to much domain logic in the form of Kong plugins.

If I may ask, what kind of functionality have you been trying to implement in a Kong plugin?

As you know, there are many plugins to do authentication in Kong. We started with jwt, then a coworker decided that we needed a more flexible approach so he basically forked the jwt plugin to add stuff for our needs. It quickly became confusing and hard to maintain.

When we tried to introduce a new feature (tokens similar to what Github offers with personal token, that is a revocable token with a given set of permissions), we had a rough time.

In the end, the decision to fork the plugin was maybe not the good one and the decision to bring the token feature into this plugin were maybe not the right one. But still, working in the plugin code was unpleasant in my opinion.

By the way, keep up the good work, it's a solid piece of software!

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