Netflix-Zuul vs Mashape-Kong

Question

Both Zuul and kong serve as a good API gateway layer in a microservices architecture. What are some important differences between these two?

Some

Hi, I am also stuck on deciding between these two. Did you come to a decision? If yes, on what parameters? – Transit

@Transit I went the Zuul way. One of the things that helped me make my decision was Spring Cloud's excellent support for the Netflix stack, I was pressed for time and Spring Cloud worked in my favour. I will be revisiting a good chunk of the decisions but I am good for now. – Some

Thanks. One more question, are you using spring cloud for creating your micsroservices? I went for Kong because I am using rest.li for creating the core layer of my microservices. – Transit

Yeah, I am using Spring cloud for everything. – Some

Answer 1

For those looking into some numbers, this is a great post of comparing the different solutions out there.

I've been implementing some cross-cutting concerns at the API Gateway level and we are using Kong. However, I think some of the libraries provided by Kong to write plugins in Lua are not as mature and solid as something written in Java for example. Lack of documentation, difficult to debug, among other problems related to scripting languages.

There are some good notes on the performance of using Netflix's Zuul versus the wrapper provided by Spring Cloud. So it might be good to take a look at those problems listed in there.

Sankey