Super excited to see more players move in this space btw!
Oathkeeper looks very interesting... Congrats and best of luck!
[0] https://www.getambassador.io
[1] https://www.getambassador.io/reference/services/auth-service
I've added this to our internal list and we will check it out and see if any synergies are possible with our products. Our vision is that these services work so well and easy with the rest of the ecosystem, that you can get started with a new project in a day or two and have everything set up - from users, to permissions, to routing (e.g. via ambassador), to testing (there's still ton of space for this), and so on.
I think the journey of software development beyond 2020 will be very exciting!
ps: Sorry for slow responses, HN has a very high post wait time once you hit the limit. And thank you for the positive vibes :)
The main differentiator is that Oathkeeper is capable of performing more sophisticated permission checks (think RBAC / AWS IAM Policies) and is specifically geared towards solving authentication and authorization in front of "your" service.
Most other implementations I saw (and I think this also goes a bit for envoy) is that they solve access control as one of the things in the feature set, while also focusing strongly on routing, load balancing, and other typical API gateway issues.
We're explicitly not trying to build another API gateway but instead something that you deploy alongside your existing API gateway (or maybe as a sidecar) with the sole purpose of checking answering: "is the request that's coming through really allowed to perform that action?".
Hope this clarifies it, if not I'm more than happy to go into more detail :)