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  5. Istio vs Kong vs seneca

Istio vs Kong vs seneca

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Kong
Kong
Stacks671
Followers1.5K
Votes139
GitHub Stars42.1K
Forks5.0K
seneca
seneca
Stacks29
Followers42
Votes2
GitHub Stars4
Forks1
Istio
Istio
Stacks2.3K
Followers1.5K
Votes54
GitHub Stars37.6K
Forks8.1K

Istio vs Kong vs seneca: What are the differences?

In the realm of microservices architecture, Istio, Kong, and Seneca are popular tools that assist in managing, securing, and orchestrating microservices.

  1. Deployment and Management: Istio excels in service mesh capabilities, providing advanced features such as traffic management, load balancing, and security policies. Kong focuses on API gateway functionalities, offering high performance and extensibility through plugins. Seneca, on the other hand, specializes in microservices communication patterns and provides flexibility in building decentralized systems.

  2. Extensibility and Customization: Istio and Kong offer extensive support for customizing configurations and integrating with various platforms through APIs or libraries. Seneca, however, emphasizes a more minimalist approach, focusing on simplicity and ease of use for developing microservices.

  3. Community and Support: Istio has a large and active community, backed by major companies like Google and IBM, providing robust support and continuous development. Kong also boasts a strong community and enterprise support, offering comprehensive documentation and a wide range of plugins. Seneca, while smaller in comparison, has a dedicated community focused on building reusable microservices components.

  4. Security Features: Istio provides robust security features such as mutual TLS authentication, authorization policies, and encryption for communication between services. Kong offers authentication and rate-limiting capabilities to secure APIs and control access. Seneca prioritizes security within the application code, with developers responsible for implementing encryption and authentication mechanisms.

  5. Scalability and Performance: Istio can handle large-scale deployments efficiently, with features like auto-scaling and distributed tracing for performance monitoring. Kong delivers high performance for API management tasks, with features like caching and microservices orchestration. Seneca is lightweight and agile, making it suitable for small to medium-sized deployments with minimal overhead.

In Summary, Istio, Kong, and Seneca each offer distinct advantages in managing microservices, with Istio focusing on service mesh capabilities, Kong on API gateway functionality, and Seneca on communication patterns. Each tool caters to specific use cases and requirements within a microservices architecture.

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Advice on Kong, seneca, Istio

Prateek
Prateek

Fullstack Engineer| Ruby | React JS | gRPC at Ex Bookmyshow | Furlenco | Shopmatic

Mar 14, 2020

Decided

Istio based on powerful Envoy whereas Kong based on Nginx. Istio is K8S native as well it's actively developed when k8s was successfully accepted with production-ready apps whereas Kong slowly migrated to start leveraging K8s. Istio has an inbuilt turn-keyIstio based on powerful Envoy whereas Kong based on Nginx. Istio is K8S native as well it's actively developed when k8s was successfully accepted with production-ready apps whereas Kong slowly migrated to start leveraging K8s. Istio has an inbuilt turn key solution with Rancher whereas Kong completely lacks here. Traffic distribution in Istio can be done via canary, a/b, shadowing, HTTP headers, ACL, whitelist whereas in Kong it's limited to canary, ACL, blue-green, proxy caching. Istio has amazing community support which is visible via Github stars or releases when comparing both.

322k views322k
Comments
lyc218
lyc218

Feb 21, 2020

Needs advice

Envoy proxy is widely adopted in many companies for service mesh proxy, but it utilizes BoringSSL by default. Red Hat OpenShift fork envoy branch with their own OpenSSL support, I wonder any other companies are also using envoy-openssl branch for compatibility? How about AWS App Mesh?

Any input would be much appreciated!

42.7k views42.7k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Kong
Kong
seneca
seneca
Istio
Istio

Kong is a scalable, open source API Layer (also known as an API Gateway, or API Middleware). Kong controls layer 4 and 7 traffic and is extended through Plugins, which provide extra functionality and services beyond the core platform.

Seneca is a toolkit for organizing the business logic of your app. You can break down your app into "stuff that happens", rather than focusing on data models or managing dependencies.

Istio is an open platform for providing a uniform way to integrate microservices, manage traffic flow across microservices, enforce policies and aggregate telemetry data. Istio's control plane provides an abstraction layer over the underlying cluster management platform, such as Kubernetes, Mesos, etc.

Logging: Log requests and responses to your system over TCP, UDP or to disk; OAuth2.0: Add easily an OAuth2.0 authentication to your APIs; Monitoring: Live monitoring provides key load and performance server metrics; IP-restriction: Whitelist or blacklist IPs that can make requests; Authentication: Manage consumer credentials query string and header tokens; Rate-limiting: Block and throttle requests based on IP or authentication; Transformations: Add, remove or manipulate HTTP params and headers on-the-fly; CORS: Enable cross-origin requests to your APIs that would otherwise be blocked; Anything: Need custom functionality? Extend Kong with your own Lua plugins;
pattern matching: a wonderfully flexible way to handle business requirements;transport independence: how messages get to the right server is not something you should have to worry about;maturity: 5 years in production (before we called it micro-services), but was once taken out by lightning;deep and wide ecosystem of plugins
-
Statistics
GitHub Stars
42.1K
GitHub Stars
4
GitHub Stars
37.6K
GitHub Forks
5.0K
GitHub Forks
1
GitHub Forks
8.1K
Stacks
671
Stacks
29
Stacks
2.3K
Followers
1.5K
Followers
42
Followers
1.5K
Votes
139
Votes
2
Votes
54
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 37
    Easy to maintain
  • 32
    Easy to install
  • 26
    Flexible
  • 21
    Great performance
  • 7
    Api blueprint
Pros
  • 2
    Multi transports support
Pros
  • 14
    Zero code for logging and monitoring
  • 9
    Service Mesh
  • 8
    Great flexibility
  • 5
    Powerful authorization mechanisms
  • 5
    Ingress controller
Cons
  • 17
    Performance
Integrations
Cassandra
Cassandra
Docker
Docker
Prometheus
Prometheus
Kubernetes
Kubernetes
PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL
NGINX
NGINX
Vagrant
Vagrant
Node.js
Node.js
Kubernetes
Kubernetes
Docker
Docker

What are some alternatives to Kong, seneca, Istio?

Amazon API Gateway

Amazon API Gateway

Amazon API Gateway handles all the tasks involved in accepting and processing up to hundreds of thousands of concurrent API calls, including traffic management, authorization and access control, monitoring, and API version management.

Tyk Cloud

Tyk Cloud

Tyk is a leading Open Source API Gateway and Management Platform, featuring an API gateway, analytics, developer portal and dashboard. We power billions of transactions for thousands of innovative organisations.

Azure Service Fabric

Azure Service Fabric

Azure Service Fabric is a distributed systems platform that makes it easy to package, deploy, and manage scalable and reliable microservices. Service Fabric addresses the significant challenges in developing and managing cloud apps.

Moleculer

Moleculer

It is a fault tolerant framework. It has built-in load balancer, circuit breaker, retries, timeout and bulkhead features. It is open source and free of charge project.

Express Gateway

Express Gateway

A cloud-native microservices gateway completely configurable and extensible through JavaScript/Node.js built for ALL platforms and languages. Enterprise features are FREE thanks to the power of 3K+ ExpressJS battle hardened modules.

ArangoDB Foxx

ArangoDB Foxx

It is a JavaScript framework for writing data-centric HTTP microservices that run directly inside of ArangoDB.

Dapr

Dapr

It is a portable, event-driven runtime that makes it easy for developers to build resilient, stateless and stateful microservices that run on the cloud and edge and embraces the diversity of languages and developer frameworks.

Zuul

Zuul

It is the front door for all requests from devices and websites to the backend of the Netflix streaming application. As an edge service application, It is built to enable dynamic routing, monitoring, resiliency, and security. Routing is an integral part of a microservice architecture.

linkerd

linkerd

linkerd is an out-of-process network stack for microservices. It functions as a transparent RPC proxy, handling everything needed to make inter-service RPC safe and sane--including load-balancing, service discovery, instrumentation, and routing.

Jersey

Jersey

It is open source, production quality, framework for developing RESTful Web Services in Java that provides support for JAX-RS APIs and serves as a JAX-RS (JSR 311 & JSR 339) Reference Implementation. It provides it’s own API that extend the JAX-RS toolkit with additional features and utilities to further simplify RESTful service and client development.

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