Mashape Open-Sources Its Kong API Management Platform | Hacker News Reader

Mashape Open-Sources Its Kong API Management Platform

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48 pointsErrorcod323 comments

Nice to see more open-source solutions in this area. I've used the popular Django Rest Framework [1] to implement and manage APIs. Would there be a compelling reason to use Kong for the management aspect?

[1] http://www.django-rest-framework.org

You no longer have to code certain features into your API and can let Kong handle it for you :)

Saving you time and money!

   Some features: http://getkong.org/plugins/

you would use both.

Django REST Framework (or any other framework) to build your business logic and API services.

Kong is useful to scale and manage acceess to the API for API consumers (as oppose to end users) as well as a plugin system that abstracts HTTP tooling away from your API application, so you can scale them independently.

open sourcing Kong which powers our API marketplace with billions of calls per day, is not only a major milestone for the team, but also marks a shift in API tooling and services, we're challenging the the status quo and service providers by giving away for free what they charge for in thousands (and in some cases millions) of dollars.

making it open source is the icing on the cake!

we want to give the power back to the developer community and together create amazing open source tooling, while directly adding years of lessons learned to your development stack.

So, what does Mashape (now) sell?

Doh, nevermind, Mashape sells, perhaps among other things, Kong Enterprise http://getkong.org/enterprise/

Glad to see this! Building out this type of infrastructure behind a publicly facing API is never fun. That's partially why one of my API's is hosted at Mashape in the first place!

This is an interesting stack, as it looks to be Nginx + Lua based with Cassandra as the backend database.

Not very common, but clearly well thought out and battle tested!

This is Marco from Mashape. Let me know if you have any questions/feedback and I will be happy to answer.

If you need a testing Cassandra node to try out Kong, we have created this: http://kongdb.org/

Thank you for releasing this - it solves some problems we've been struggling with , and I'm really excited to use it. [ which i don't say often]

Thank you, let me know how I can help. You can find me at: https://gitter.im/Mashape/kong

Big fan of Mashape, and opening up a stack for API devs that easily does the auth, metering, etc is a big win for the glue economy. love it.

I know it's so much like 'indirect marketing' things for Mashape. But, this stuff is pretty helpful for developers to create an API service in minutes. Thanks so much, Mashape.

Please do let us know what you think about it! We've worked very hard to open-source it the correct way :)

Well, despite Kong is still on highly development mode[1], the documentations[0] is well written. I'm impressed.

[0] http://getkong.org/docs/ [1] https://github.com/Mashape/kong/releases

Thank you, glad to hear my hard work has paid off :)

Another quality open-source project from Mashape! I had written a blog post about ~2.5 years ago on building our own API backed system: http://blog.semantics3.com/building-a-paid-api-offering/

If Kong had been available then, we would have probably gone with it.

thanks varun, very cool what you built there! :) definitely looking forward to possible contributions from you to the github project ;P

Looks very useful, congrats! Cassandra dependency may be an obstacle for wider adoption.

"Don't worry if you are not experienced with these technologies, Kong works out of the box"

These kind of statements are problematic. If you are not already using Cassandra, I'm not sure introducing another data store you don't have experience with would be a good move.

Are there any plans to abstract out the datastore or make it pluggable. For example, we can replace cassandra with rethink-db or leveldb

For now we have created http://kongdb.org - to have Kong running easily. For production use of Cassandra hosted we suggest Instaclustr.

https://www.instaclustr.com/

Cassandra is very easy to start and use. Almost as easy as Redis.

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