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AWS App Mesh vs Zuul: What are the differences?
Introduction
AWS App Mesh and Zuul are both service mesh solutions that provide traffic management and control capabilities for microservices architectures. However, there are key differences between these two solutions. In this article, we will explore the main differentiating factors between AWS App Mesh and Zuul.
Traffic Routing: AWS App Mesh uses a declarative approach for traffic routing. Configuration for routing rules, such as path-based routing or weighted routing, is defined using App Mesh-specific constructs like Virtual Nodes and Virtual Routers. On the other hand, Zuul uses an imperative approach for traffic routing. Routing rules are defined using a Zuul-specific configuration file that maps URL patterns to backend services.
Service Discovery: AWS App Mesh integrates seamlessly with AWS Cloud Map for service discovery. It automatically registers the services and updates the DNS entries as services come and go. On the contrary, Zuul relies on external service discovery mechanisms like Eureka or Consul for service registration and discovery.
Protocol Support: AWS App Mesh supports both Layer 4 (TCP) and Layer 7 (HTTP/HTTP2) protocols, allowing granular control over traffic management. Additionally, it supports gRPC, WebSocket, and HTTP/2 Server Push. Zuul, on the other hand, primarily focuses on Layer 7 protocols and provides advanced features specific to HTTP/HTTPS traffic management.
Platform Integration: AWS App Mesh is tightly integrated with the AWS ecosystem and seamlessly works with other AWS services like AWS Lambda, Elastic Load Balancer, Amazon EC2, etc. It leverages AWS IAM for access control and monitoring purposes. In contrast, Zuul is agnostic to the underlying platform and can be deployed on any infrastructure, making it more suitable for multi-cloud or hybrid cloud environments.
Observability: AWS App Mesh provides comprehensive observability features like distributed tracing, logging, and metrics through integration with AWS X-Ray and CloudWatch. It allows detailed visibility into the microservices architecture and facilitates troubleshooting. Zuul also provides observability features but requires additional tooling integration for distributed tracing and log aggregation.
Scalability: AWS App Mesh leverages AWS Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS) or Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (ECS) to scale and manage the underlying infrastructure, providing high scalability. On the contrary, Zuul can be scaled horizontally by deploying multiple instances, but it does not provide built-in infrastructure management capabilities.
In summary, AWS App Mesh and Zuul differ in their approach to traffic routing, service discovery, protocol support, platform integration, observability features, and scalability capabilities. These differences make each solution suitable for specific use cases, depending on the requirements of the microservices architecture.
One of our applications is currently migrating to AWS, and we need to make a decision between using AWS API Gateway with AWS App Mesh, or Kong API Gateway with Kuma.
Some people advise us to benefit from AWS managed services, while others raise the vendor lock issue. So, I need your advice on that, and if there is any other important factor rather than vendor locking that I must take into consideration.
The benefit of using Kuma + Kong Gateway are:
- Feature-set: Kong + Kuma provide an end-to-end solution for both APIM and Service Mesh with a feature-set, and a performance, that is not matched by AWS services. In addition to this you can extend Kong Gateway with 70+ plugins out of the box and choose between 500+ plugins from the community to cover every use-case. In comparison, the feature-set of AWS API Gateway is quite limited and basic.
- Performance: Especially in the case of Kong Gateway, performance has always been a top priority for the project (more performance deliver more reliable applications). In some benchmarks the latency added by AWS API Gateway can be 200x more than what you would achieve with Kong Gateway natively which has been hand-crafted for maximum throughput.
- Cost: While cloud vendors like AWS make it very easy to get up and running with their services at a lower initial cost, that cost ramps up very quickly (exponentially) as the number of requests are increasing. With Kong GW you don't have this problem, since you can run tens of thousands of concurrent requests on a small EC2 instance (or Kubernetes Ingress, via the native K8s ingress controller for Kong Gateway).
- Portability: You can replicate your infrastructure on any other cloud, or on your development machines with ease. Want to run your gateway + mesh on your local Kubernetes cluster? You can do that. Want to run your infrastructure on another cloud provider? You can do that. Strategically you have full ownership of your infrastructure and its future. When it comes to Kuma, you can also run a Mesh on VM-based workloads in addition to Kubernetes (Kuma is universal).
- And much more.
Disclaimer: I am the CTO of Kong.
AWS App Mesh is useful when your micro services are deployed across Ec2 , EKS or ECS. Assume you are in process of migrating microservices from ec2 instances to ecs, its easy to switch using Virtual router configuration. As App Mesh is managed service and easy to bring up ,its worth giving it a try for your use case before choosing Kuma or any other tool.
Pros of AWS App Mesh
Pros of Zuul
- Load blancing8
