Unlocking the Power of Kong API Gateway: Our Migration Journey from AWS API Gateway

In the ever-evolving landscape of microservices architecture, having an efficient and robust API gateway is critical. Recently, we undertook the significant task of migrating from AWS API Gateway to Kong API Gateway. This move brought a host of benefits, including reduced latency, enhanced security, better metrics visibility, and improved logging. In this blog post, we'll dive into the key advantages of this migration and how Kong API Gateway has transformed our operations.


Why We Made the Switch

Our decision to migrate was driven by several compelling factors:

  1. Latency Reduction: One of the most immediate benefits we observed was a significant reduction in latency. Kong API Gateway, being highly optimized and lightweight, processes requests faster, ensuring that our microservices communicate more efficiently.
  2. Enhanced Security: Security is paramount in any architecture, and Kong excels in this area. With robust authentication and authorization mechanisms, it ensures that our microservices are protected against potential threats. The ability to keep our microservices private further fortifies our security posture.
  3. Private Microservices: With Kong, we can keep our microservices private, exposing only the necessary endpoints. This helps in minimizing the attack surface and protecting our internal services from unauthorized access.
  4. Superior Metrics Visibility: Kong provides better visibility into the performance of our APIs. The detailed metrics and monitoring capabilities allow us to gain deep insights into our traffic patterns, helping us to optimize and scale our services effectively.
  5. Comprehensive Logging: One of the standout features of Kong is its logging capabilities. We can see all requests coming to the Kong API Gateway, which aids in troubleshooting and auditing. The detailed logs provide invaluable information that helps in maintaining the health and performance of our services.
  6. Rich Plugin Ecosystem: Kong's extensive plugin ecosystem is a game-changer. The available plugins offer a wide range of functionalities, from rate limiting and caching to transformations and security enhancements. This extensibility allows us to customize Kong to meet our specific needs without extensive development effort.
  7. Easy Deployment with Helm on EKS: Setting up Kong on Amazon EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) using Helm charts was straightforward and efficient. The seamless deployment process saved us considerable time and resources, allowing us to focus on optimizing our API gateway rather than wrestling with complex configurations.
  8. Improved Manageability: Managing Kong API Gateway is significantly simpler compared to our previous setup. The intuitive management interface and comprehensive documentation make it easy to configure and maintain, reducing the operational overhead.


Conclusion

The migration to Kong API Gateway has been a transformative journey for our organization. The significant improvements in latency, security, visibility, logging, and manageability have validated our decision to switch from AWS API Gateway. Kong's powerful features and extensive plugin ecosystem have empowered us to create a more efficient, secure, and scalable API management solution.


Many thanks to my teammates vibhor malhotra and Milan Sharma for their help in achieving this.

Luis Dipotet Garabito

Senior Software Engineer & Founder of SCADIP | Scala/Java | Cloud Computing | NoSQL Databases | AWS

2 周

Hi Vinamra, I won't discuss any of the Kong topics mentioned here, as it depends on your company's budget for Cloud Infrastructure. We have been using #Kong Gateway for years in production environments with different implementations: #AWS EKS + Kong Ingress Controller?-?(which was quite expensive) #AWS ECS (this one is cheaper) One thing I don't like is the lack of elasticity in low-traffic systems. At the end of the day, you end up paying for resources and services that you don't use, quite the opposite of what you expect when deciding to use a cloud provider. We are currently at point 2, desperately looking for a solution that includes elasticity as a feature.

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ANAND MOHAN TIWARI

Staff Engineer(Embedded System Structure Design) at Samsung Semiconductor India Research { Ex Qualcomm,proxim wireless }

6 个月

Interesting!

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Rajesh Goyal

Engineering Manager at Qoala

6 个月

Nice article vinamra gupta. Thanks for highlighting the benefits of migrating from AWS API Gateway to Kong API Gateway. The improvements in latency, security, metrics visibility, and logging are compelling reasons for making the switch. However, it would be insightful to know about how you & your team executed the migration process itself. Understanding the specific steps, challenges, and best practices you followed to unlock the power of Kong API Gateway would add a valuable dimension to it. Thanks for sharing your journey.

Pranav A

Building @e6data | AWS Certified Solutions Architect | 2.5M+Impressions | AWS Instructor at Whizlabs | All Things Kubernetes | HashiCorp Terraform Associate | Certified DevOps Engineer | Linux | Google Cloud | Docker

6 个月

Insightful! vinamra gupta

Milan Sharma

Senior Principal DevOps Engineer at Indmoney

6 个月

Kong is inevitable, really helped us in providing reliability to an app.

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