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Comment by sinzone | Hacker News Reader

You should look into the open source Kong for managing your microservices http://getkong.org - Github repo https://github.com/mashape/kong

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Can you explain what Kong does and why you would use it? I'm having a tough time finding anything of substance on the website which talks about why Kong exists

It's the 2nd main call to action in the middle of the page: http://cl.ly/image/230t2d0H403a

Yes, I guess it wasn't clear from my comment, but I have read their site. Assuming you're being sincere, this doesn't mean anything to me: http://imgur.com/BZz409G

Well.. to understand the value you need to have a bit of knowledge on how microservice architectures work and why an API Gateway (like Kong, which is the most popular OSS solution for that) is a fundamental part of it. ;)

I suggest to start from here to get up to speed: http://microservices.io/patterns/apigateway.html

From a cursory look, it's a set of Lua scripts that augment Nginx with features like authentication and such, so that you can avoid implementing them in the actual services.

Kong is meant to replace nginx or HAproxy but with additional functionality added as plugins. For example you could proxy any APIs or microservices and add authentication, rate-limiting and logging as plugins.

Nginx can also be extended with modules and Lua scripts, which can add authentication, rate-limiting and logging.

EDIT: It seems Kong doesn't really replace Nginx, it's actually a set of Lua scripts for Nginx.

Correct. Kong is Nginx on steroids (w/ Lua + Cassandra) for managing microservices.

Even though Kong uses Nginx under the hood as a user you interface with Kong through the CLI or REST API and don't deal directly with Nginx or it's config files. While Kong is a mix of Nginx + Lua + Cassandra it's meant to take the place Nginx in your software stack.

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