Show HN: GONK – an ultra-lightweight, edge-native API gateway written in Go

Hi HN, I built GONK, a small API gateway written in Go, aimed at edge, IoT and constrained or offline environments where full-blown gateways feel like overkill.

Repo: https://github.com/JustVugg/gonk

What it does

GONK handles the common “front of service” concerns while staying simple and dependency-free: • Routing and reverse proxying • JWT-based auth with RBAC and scope validation • mTLS with client cert authentication and flexible role mapping • Load balancing (round-robin, weighted, least-connections, IP hash) • Upstream health checks and automatic failover • Single static binary, no external services required

There’s also a CLI to generate configs, JWTs and certificates so you don’t have to hand-edit YAML.

Why

Gateways like Kong, Traefik or NGINX are great, but they often assume: • cloud-native environments • control planes, databases, or external dependencies • more resources than you realistically have on edge devices or air-gapped systems

GONK is designed for industrial setups, edge nodes, offline networks and small deployments where you just want something that works and is easy to reason about.

Getting started

git clone https://github.com/JustVugg/gonk cd gonk make build ./bin/gonk-cli init --template basic --output gonk.yaml ./bin/gonk -config gonk.yaml

Looking for feedback

I’d love input from folks working on: • IoT / edge computing • air-gapped or industrial systems • embedded or low-resource deployments

Does this auth + gateway model feel practical in real setups? What features would you expect next (or would not want)?