Is Kong better than MuleSoft?

Is Kong better than MuleSoft?

The first time we used Kong, we did so in the pre-release and early days.

When it first shipped, we were impressed. We'd seen Kong demo at TechCrunch 50 and we liked how simple it was. From that day forward, we would regularly use Kong, because it performed better and was easier to work with than MuleSoft's API management platform.

We recently looked at MongoDB Atlas, which lets you set up a MongoDB cluster on Google Cloud Platform, similar to our Elasticache setup for MySQL. MongoDB Atlas is also interesting because it combines the best features of AWS Elasticache and Atlas with MongoDB. You can get up to 80% off by deploying MongoDB Atlas instances via AWS ECS for free.

The next step of the journey is Kong Enterprise edition, which offers a few important improvements that make the platform easier to manage. This is the version you'll probably choose if you already have an active license for Kong. It's where Kong's main value adds lie.

In this post, we want to walk you through what Kong's been doing in order to take it from that great state and improve upon it. Let's start with our favorite use case of Kong and move on to additional features.

Kong Is Easy to Set Up, Manage, and Use. You can simply do an HTTP GET request to start a proxy server: This proxy listens on TCP port 8080, and responds to requests for websites with responses in the HTML application. When you visit one of these websites, you get a nice web page back instead of raw XML or JSON. The page may be served from a third-party CDN, or it may be your own content. Kong provides an abstraction layer between the HTTP client and the upstreams you're caching, which allows you to create new proxies without recompiling your Apache, Nginx, or other HTTP server.

The Proxy Manager tab shows which upstreams are available to proxy. You can see more details by expanding the proxy's entry: The interface above is similar to Elasticache's APIS page, though not quite as complete. We'll talk about that later.

Is Kong open source?

Kong is open source software.

Kong development, hosted at KongHQ, is entirely open source and publicly available for anyone to contribute to. As a result, Kong serves as an example of what can be achieved in the context of an open source community. This was an effort that started before Kong's launch, but came to full fruition with the community's creation of Kong Enterprise a commercial version of Kong tailored to business users.

Community contribution is key to Kong's success. As open source projects grow larger and more complex, they are often too large for a single person organization to tackle alone. The size of the Kong project has grown, but it remains manageable due to its highly-coordinated structure. It's still possible to work on Kong from the community without having to pay for development time.

To learn more about the Kong open source project, you can browse our docs on Github, or take a tour through our public documentation. You can also visit our wiki for more details about the various teams that comprise Kong.

Why Kong? Our customers rely on Kong for highly available, scalable service delivery and event stream processing. A fully open source technology, Kong represents a new generation of infrastructure solutions that support modern cloud applications and microservices.

Kong helps organizations accelerate their adoption of microservices by providing a simple way to quickly deploy services and build reliable, fault tolerant systems. Kong offers flexible support for all major cloud providers, as well as Kubernetes, Docker Swarm and Mesos container orchestration systems.

Who is Kong good for? Kong works well in most scenarios. In fact, we recommend using Kong if you're deploying microservices in Kubernetes or if you need event processing in your stack. To learn more about why Kong is ideal for different use cases, check out this blog post.

There are many different ways to use Kong, and we're always working to support new use cases. For example, Kong Enterprise was recently extended to support Docker Compose. We also offer plugins for AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, Azure Functions, OpenStack, ElasticSearch, OpenWhisk and other workloads, as well as support for Kafka and RabbitMQ messaging services.

Is Kong better than Nginx?

Nginx is used by Google, Facebook, and some large companies such as LinkedIn.

We're big Nginx fans here at SiteGround and we've been using it for almost 9 years now.

However, this year (2019) we started looking for alternatives. This post will compare the two big players and let you know what the future may hold.

What is Kong? SiteGround's blog has an excellent comparison of these two projects. However, we've created a new comparison which makes it easy to quickly read.

It's an open-source platform to easily add web server and a high-performance reverse proxy server with built-in load balancer and API gateway. While it does have some similarities to Nginx, one of the great benefits is you can quickly install in Kubernetes on any hosting provider like Amazon AWS, Azure, or a VPS/Docker server with ease.

There are multiple Kong installations currently at our hosting partners. Webserver - Apache. Nginx - www.siteground.com

Apache - http.com nginx - blog.com Amazon API Gateway -. Azure API Management -. Cloudflare -. Kong is a great all-rounder when it comes to features and functionality. Its feature set includes automatic SSL termination for HTTP/1.1/2 connections, HTTP/2 support, compression, and more. Kong even integrates with many popular APIs including Amazon API Gateway, Twilio SMS, SES, Stripe, etc. It's also very fast, especially when compared to Nginx. Kong works great on Cloudflare or AWS.

Why use Kong over Nginx? Before going any further, we should talk about Apache and Nginx a bit, as some may confuse Kong with Nginx. Apache is currently running on our WordPress websites and blogs. This means we have one version of Nginx, Apache and many other applications in production. The rest of this post will mainly be about why we feel Kong is better than Nginx and why it may replace some Apache or Nginx-based configurations for our clients.