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Gravitee: Open-Source API Gateway

gravitee.io

21–30 of 47 posts

Re: Gravitee: Open-Source API Gateway

#21
Running these api gateways on your own is very complex, especially when they need to be open publicly. Typically you’d want to layer a WAF and a CDN on top of them, which already come with their own api gateway like features (eg AWS cloudfront).

My question - what do people use these for?

Re: Gravitee: Open-Source API Gateway

#22

Not speaking about the project itself, but since when did 100% Open Source become a thing?

3 popular OSS models:

    1. 100% open source, funded by some entities, you can purchase  subscription for its professional support and service.
    2. 100% open source by volunteers and the community, document might be lacking but you got what you pay for.
    3. open-core, only the core portion is open and you pay a premium for plugins or its enterprise-version/pro-version.
I personally do not use option 3, and I think 1 is great for both sides.

Re: Gravitee: Open-Source API Gateway

#23

Not speaking about the project itself, but since when did 100% Open Source become a thing?

Kong has Community Edition and an Enterprise Edition with non-free/proprietary features (same model as MySQL, Nginx, GitLab, & Redis). It's called the open-core model. Company is signaling that it intends to offer all features open source and without restriction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-core_model

the evil is in the details so it really depends on the boundary where the core is defined at, in nginx/mysql's case, the core is large enough for 99% small players, and the big players are willing to pay and the income is enough to sustain the projects. I somehow feel Kong's core is a bit limited which is how I found out Gravitee.

Re: Gravitee: Open-Source API Gateway

#25

Running these api gateways on your own is very complex, especially when they need to be open publicly. Typically you’d want to layer a WAF and a CDN on top of them, which already come with their own api gateway like features (eg AWS cloudfront). My question - what do people use these for?

API Gateways back in the days were primarily being adopted at the edge for external traffic, but they are increasingly being used internally to connect teams/products together, or in a Service Mesh deployment pattern for microservices. Solutions provided by cloud vendors are generally not well suited for all the N-S and E-W use-cases that typically an organization requires, they are usually slow (which in turn prevents more decoupled and traffic intensive architectures from working well), provide little extensibility options and while are every cheap to get up and running with, they also get expensive very quickly as traffic increases exponentially.

Disclaimer: I am CTO of Kong [1].

[1] https://konghq.com

Re: Gravitee: Open-Source API Gateway

#27
post #2

Trying it out now. For those who have already: how does Gravitee compare w/ Apigee, Kong, API Gateway etc.

From what I gather in the GitHub repository, they implement their own L7 management, instead of using NGINX, Envoy, HAProxy, etc. IMO, this adds quite a bit of development cost with minimum benefit.

Kong has built on OpenResty (which is built on NGINX), Ambassador has been built on Envoy Proxy -- I think these projects will be able to sustain their velocity more so than projects that need to maintain their own L7 engine. Just watching the speed at which Envoy Proxy is adding stuff is kind of staggering; hard to imagine how another company could do the same on their own homegrown engine.

Re: Gravitee: Open-Source API Gateway

#28
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recent CF blog (by a guest author) about increasing LuaJIT performance https://blog.cloudflare.com/more-consistent-luajit-performan...

tl;dr: Lua is a GC language and that's where the variance comes from.

As the co-author of that blog post a more accurate tl;dr would be the variance comes from shared hot counters that collide based on the address of objects.

Re: Gravitee: Open-Source API Gateway

#29
post #22

Not speaking about the project itself, but since when did 100% Open Source become a thing?

3 popular OSS models: 1. 100% open source, funded by some entities, you can purchase subscription for its professional support and service. 2. 100% open source by volunteers and the community, document might be lacking but you got what you pay for. 3. open-core, only the core portion is open and you pay a premium for plugins or its enterprise-version/pro-version. I personally do not use option 3, and I think 1 is gre…

What is the practical difference between 1 and 3?

Like, support aside, what's the difference between "pay a premium to access professional services from the dev team" and "pay a premium to access a service already professionally-built by the dev team"?

Re: Gravitee: Open-Source API Gateway

#30

Why none of these API gateways offer monetization out of the box? I'm curious. Is that a not well-demanded feature? I have researched a lot of them and none have a straight way to do metered billing and if they somehow do, they are prohibitively expensive. Does somebody know of an API gateway solution that offers this?

In the same boat. I think you can do something with API Gateway + API Marketplace but I would LOVE a plugin to Kong or any other OS software...even if it would support just one gateway.

$500 for Apigee makes it untouchable for small startups. Another one worth looking into might be at IBM bluemix.

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