Author: maplecg

Many of us may remember King Kong movie in mid seventies, a giant monster climbing Manhattan buildings grabbing planes with hands and smash them to the ground.

Kong and skull island has a different meaning when it comes to Software, API development and DevOps world.

API development is a fast growing trend among all technology-driven companies. Its management and administration is becoming a concern. In small companies API gateway can be simplified to a HTTP server but when number of API endpoints increases to more than couple of hundreds it would be a massive integration and deployment overhead associated with it.

This is a common problem these days, lots of enterprises offer commercial and proprietary solutions to address API gateway and management. Opensource community on the other side of this equation introduced bunch of projects like Tyk, wso2, gravitee and Kong Which I want to talk about it in this article.

Kong is an opensource API gateway tool developed in Mashape company. It has being developed in Lua and published under Apache License 2.0 , it’s source code can be found in github. Community is actively working on it and new features and bug fixes are getting merged within days. For instance we had an issue connecting to Cassandra database over SSL and they resolved it in hours.

Since Kong is very API rich itself, there are bunch of tooling around it such as web dashboards, monitoring, and backup tools.

We gave couple of backup and restore tools a try. Tools such as Kongfig, Biplane are developed to do the backup and restore endpoints but each of these tools had their limitations. Kongfig for example is a great tool to backup your API endpoints but when it comes to Continuous Deployment process, it does not modify the endpoints in place. It only is able to append endpoints at the end of list which is fair, because it meant to do backup and restore.

Biplane on the other hand has been written in Crystal, it is very nice in syncing process. It is built to be used for docker container but we did not find it “docker independent” in case you want to run it outside of the container box. Since Crystal itself is not mature enough we were not be able to build it from source in different Linux distros.

Skull island is another tool built in Node by Calvin Fernandez and published to opensource community under MIT license. This project is inspired by Kongfig and Biplane and covers the weak points of those projects.

I found full (API Endpoints, Consumers and plugins) Synchronisation in Skull Island so handy over the other two tools; also in CI/CD process it is so flexible to run since it’s in Node.

Combination of Kong, Skull Island, Kong dashboard and Galileo for monitoring would cover most of the requirements and would be a nice API gateway solution to every API development teams across the world and I highly recommend it.