What is the difference between Kong and NGINX?

What is the difference between API gateway and NGINX?

An API gateway is a layer that sits between your services (backend systems) and the public Internet. It's usually used to wrap your backend systems and make them accessible via web APIs (often JSON or XML). In this case, it's like an "old style" web proxy. But it's different from a regular web proxy because it does much more than just proxy the HTTP requests.

NGINX is an open-source server for application servers. It doesn't have a HTTP/HTTPS layer, instead you use it as a web proxy or load balancer. So it's a lot more than a web proxy. You can use it to rewrite the URLs that you are serving, but it's not what you would do in a "real world" scenario.

API gateways are for accessing back-end REST/SOAP web services, they can be built using any technology. The reason they are often used is because the services can often be accessed using HTTP over HTTPS, and the requests must be processed through a security system before being sent out on the Internet.

NGINX is a web server, it provides a web server service and also acts as a load balancer. You would use it if you want to create a web site.

I have always understood API gateways to be something akin to a reverse proxy. I do not think that the term has ever referred to the kind of thing that the other answers seem to be describing.

What is API management NGINX?

API management for NGINX is one of the best examples of how to use NGINX as a full-stack application.

It is also an example of how to create a product around a specific set of features, rather than just being another generic web server. You can read more about NGINX's API here:

Now, I do want to say this this is not a tutorial. I'm not here to teach you how to create API management with NGINX. What I am here to do is provide you with a framework, a blueprint, if you will, that you can use to create your own API management with NGINX. There are many different ways to create an API management system, but what I've chosen to do is to use NGINX as a reverse proxy in front of your backend system.

Let's dive right into it! Creating an API Management API using NGINX. Alright, so the first thing we need to do is to create a backend system that has an API. We'll use Node.js to build our API backend and we'll use the Postman Chrome app to test it out.

If you don't have Node.js or Postman, they're both free to use.

First, we'll create a basic express app that has an endpoint called /api that returns some dummy data. Here, we'll also create a basic NGINX configuration that will allow us to expose the API to the public. This NGINX configuration will expose the API over http, only allow access from localhost, and then redirect requests for /api to the / endpoint of our express server. Alright, now we need to create our API server. Let's start with the API backend, which we'll name api-backend .

The following is a basic Express app that serves up an endpoint that returns some dummy data.