KrakenD

Pros: Simplicity, ease of use, statelessness, and immutability are crucial factors when selecting an API Gateway. Additionally, features such as circuit breaker, rate limiting, and authentication prove invaluable in preventing the need to reimplement these functionalities across all microservices within my network.

Cons: I haven't identified any missing essential features for my use cases. The product, even in its community version, is excellent straight out of the box.

Overall: Setting up this API gateway is remarkably easy; within just a few minutes, you can have an instance deployed and fully operational. Even if you're not acquainted with JSON configuration files, you can utilize a user-friendly GUI to configure your settings and effortlessly download a customized file.

Pros: Minimal Resources used (hardware).
Super fast and efficient (throughput is incredible).
Affordable.
Secure/Agile.
Easy Upgrades.

Cons: More detailed documentation (custom plugins).
Nothing more at this time.

Overall: We can bring endpoints to market much quicker than in the past. We have been able to adopt a new micro-service strategy powered by Krakend API gateway. We are now more secure and have a product that can scale and grow with us as a company. The Krakend support team is great and it has been a welcomed partnership.

Pros: KrakenD stands out for its ease of use configuration files making setup a breeze. Its efficient handling of numerous APIs and private services has streamlined our operations. The ability to easily route, aggregate, and transform data, coupled with high performance under heavy loads, has significantly improved our backend processes.

Cons: While KrakenD’s overall usage was straightforward, specific challenges arose in customizing cache and headers. We needed to make modifications to adapt it perfectly to our unique requirements.

Overall: Using KrakenD has been a great success. Its ease of configuration and robust API gateway features have substantially improved our backend systems. The tool's ability to manage high traffic and its adaptability to our specific technical requirements have made it an invaluable asset in our technology stack.

Pros: KrakenD stands out for its operational simplicity and GitOps approach, aligning seamlessly with modern infrastructure-as-code practices. This aspect, coupled with its streamlined declarative configuration, allows developers to manage API gateways as they would any other codebase, ensuring efficiency and ease of use. The gateway's adaptability is further enhanced by a robust plugin ecosystem, making it a highly customizable solution for diverse API management needs.

Cons: KrakenD's hyper-focused approach to API gateway functionality means it lacks built-in tools like a management UI or a Developer Portal solution. While this streamlined focus contributes to its operational efficiency, it necessitates reliance on third-party integrations for these aspects, which some users might find less convenient.

Overall: For those looking to get a hands-on feel for KrakenD, I recommend exploring the Playgrounds available on GitHub. These Playgrounds provide a practical and straightforward starting point for building a Proof of Concept, allowing new users to quickly grasp the capabilities and benefits of the KrakenD gateway.

KrakenD is particularly effective in deploying Backend for Frontend (BFF) solutions for scalable APIs. Its architectural efficiency ensures predictable and stable costs, making it a financially sensible choice for businesses looking to scale their API infrastructure without the burden of unpredictable expenses.

In summary, KrakenD excels in operational simplicity and a GitOps-driven approach, offering a customizable and efficient solution for API management. While it lacks certain built-in tools, its focus on core functionality and easy integration with third-party solutions make it a compelling choice.

Pros: - Easy to get started
- Good documentation
- Plenty of features in the community edition
- Built by engineers for engineers

Cons: Go templates can be slightly confusing to work with if you're using flexible configuration.

Overall: Great product! What really sells this is the documentation and ease of use compared to more enterprisey competitors.

Pros: My main advantage is around its performance and capacity. Even in small instances it's extremely powerful. Besides, its documentation and overall ease of use are always helpful for those new to tools out of the native solutions of the large cloud providers. I liked a lot its extensibility too.

Cons: OpenTelemetry has been lately improved, but is still highly dependent on the large players. This is clearly related to the size of the team supporting all this (since it is not a huge company even if the quality of the product indicates so!) but still appears as the ideal wish list topic.

Overall: KrakenD allowed me to experiment with different APIs and their endpoints in a private setup, which was great as a PoC for splitting some services, saving me from the hassle of creating something that would end up as usual, too coupled to the cloud provider, giving me extra freedom.

Pros: KrakenD stands out for its extensibility, offering an extensive plugin ecosystem and flexible configuration options to adapt to various API needs. Its well-written codebase simplifies creating custom plugins, enhancing its functionality as an API gateway.

Cons: Despite its robust telemetry support with services like Prometheus, Datadog, and Grafana, a significant limitation of KrakenD is the absence of native OpenTelemetry integration. Fortunately, since the sunsetting of OpenCensus, they are actively working on incorporating this feature and nowadays you can use that implementation as a bridge.

Overall: KrakenD is the simplest API Gateway out there. It's easy to use, it's scalable and it's very extensible. Also it has a very easy configuration system, and since it's open source, you can read its elegant code base.

Pros: - Free community edition
- Open Source
- No Single Point of Failure
- Config in standard JSON schema
- Visual config designer
- Better performance than alternatives
- Golang binary ready to plug and play
- Easy to configure for Backend for Frontend architectures
- Linux foundation project guaranteeing its governance

Cons: Despite being very easy to use and not having a heavy learning curve, It is not the most popular API Gateway solution nowadays, so it is not so easy to find people who already master it.

Overall: We started using it in production 3-4 years ago and the maintenance and problems it give us has been almost zero.

Pros: It offers a lightweight, highly scalable API gateway solution that discards old-fashioned Full Lifecycle API Management (FLAM) systems, which have become cumbersome and inefficient in handling large-scale API operations. In our benchmarking phase, Kraken processed close to a million requests per second in a 20-machine cluster.
Perfect for multi-region setups. Its configuration simplification is pivotal where rapid scaling and agility are crucial. KrakenD's focus on core gateway functionalities, rather than the broad but shallow approach of FLAM systems, and allows for more specialized, high-performance API management.

Cons: It is not a complete API management solution, as it relies on third parties to offer API monetization (it has a plugin for this).

Overall: As Full Lifecycle APIM solutions become increasingly unwieldy for businesses focused on scaling efficiently, KrakenD emerges as a superior alternative. Its stateless, high-performance architecture is designed for rapid scalability and high-volume traffic management. By concentrating on the core essentials of API gateway functionalities, KrakenD offers a more efficient, simple approach to API management, particularly for organizations prioritizing scalability and performance over the broad feature set of traditional FLAM systems.

Pros: KrakenD offers high performance and high availability, handling a lot of traffic on each instance. It features linear scalability, meaning more hardware leads to increased output without complex coordination, although we have rarely seen the autoscale trigger because the CPU is super stable even with different loads. KrakenD supports various protocols and API specifications, providing access controls, data transformations, integrations, and caching. It's customizable with a plugin system and implements the Backend For Frontend pattern for aggregating multiple API responses which we use for 3rd parties. KrakenD aligns with OWASP practices for security and is data storage-free for compliance. Its configuration is straightforward, with extensive documentation and platform-agnostic deployment. The open-source community version is free, and the Enterprise Edition has additional features with expert support.

Cons: KrakenD's extensive customization options require technical understanding, which may be challenging for some teams less engineering-oriented. The self-paced online training requires time investment.

Overall: KrakenD runs fast and scales easily, and is suitable for businesses seeking to get on API management. It offers a balance between advanced features and engineering convenience. Transparent pricing and community support make it applicable for various business sizes.