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Manage Your API Services Solemnly
What do you like best about the product?
Kong API Gateway is helpful to manage our back-end services. I appreciate having it because it reduces cumbersome processes for us. I focus on my services in this way.
What do you dislike about the product?
I' haven't faced critical challenges with micro-services architecture. Therefore I have no idea downsides of it yet. I think current features are working very well for us.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
There are some common problems among services. They are caching requests/responses, authorization/authentication, proxy mechanisms, and so on. Kong API Gateway helps us to manage these steps in the center point.
Very Performant and feature rich API Gateway
What do you like best about the product?
Kong API Gateway is easy to install on several platforms (k8s, VM) and is very feature-rich.
Several plugins allow me to apply policies to my APIs at a global or granular level, from securing the API, request/response validation to rate limiting to name but a few.
There is a very active community which is great to see, and most plugins if not bundled with the product have been written within the community and you can add these to your Kong install pretty easily. Observability is a key component of Kong and without much trouble, you can generate and display health and traffic level metrics. Kong integrates with all your well known third party monitoring systems e.g. prometheus. grafana and ELK (plus many more - these are just the most common ones)
Several plugins allow me to apply policies to my APIs at a global or granular level, from securing the API, request/response validation to rate limiting to name but a few.
There is a very active community which is great to see, and most plugins if not bundled with the product have been written within the community and you can add these to your Kong install pretty easily. Observability is a key component of Kong and without much trouble, you can generate and display health and traffic level metrics. Kong integrates with all your well known third party monitoring systems e.g. prometheus. grafana and ELK (plus many more - these are just the most common ones)
What do you dislike about the product?
As mentioned before Kong API Gateway is easy to install and feature-rich, but I think one of Kong's negative aspects is its documentation. The documentation is not always very clear, often missing information and sometimes I have found the examples/tutorials don't work. Something I think they can improve on.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
The problem solved with any API Gateway is the management of your North-South traffic and centralized governance of the policies you wish to apply. Kong API Gateway allows you to do this via plugins, either built and managed by Kong or custom plugins written by yourself or the community. This means developers can just build their APIs and not have to worry about things like authentication, authorization or even validation as this can be managed globally across all your APIs in the gateway. These policies (plugins) can then also be built into your GitOps pipelines allowing you to automate applying these policies across your API estate.
Kong is an all around superstar at any level
What do you like best about the product?
Kong is a great solution for deploying a cloud vendor-agnostic API Gateway. You can deploy it from a container or with the native binary. I am especially fond of the leveraging the Kong Ingress Controller in K8s as I find it to be on the simplest ways to handle both Ingress and Routing with the other Kong feature as frosting on the cake.
What do you dislike about the product?
Kong's freemium model of open source can be frustrating for some, but in my opinion, it averages out in the end. You either have the internal team members on your roster to support the open-source product at enterprise scale or you leverage their team to support you at enterprise scale.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
K8's Ingress and service routing, load balancing, authorization for APIs using OIDC, rate-limiting, logging, monitoring
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Kong is a great API Gateway solution for project of all sizes
Kong is a very flexible, robust and cloud ready plattform, an excellent choice for an API Gateway.
What do you like best about the product?
The OSS base for the product is great, and the documentation is pretty good too.
What do you dislike about the product?
Plugin customization with Lua adds the need to lear a new programming language. Of course you can develop plugins with Go or JS, but the performance is not the same. I also think there could be more community involvement.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
The problems includes creating an automated pipeline (based on OpenAPI and using an API-First approach) to deploy and expose APIs.
The benefits are the customizations that are possible with Lua custom plugins and the fact that Kong is very Kubernetes friendly.
The benefits are the customizations that are possible with Lua custom plugins and the fact that Kong is very Kubernetes friendly.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Start with Kong OSS and "feel" if your company needs Kong Enterprise. Also, consider using others tools from the Kong ecossystem like Insomnia and Kuma, because they have good integration with Kong API Gateway.
Simple Setup, Easy to configure and customise.
What do you like best about the product?
Kong API Gateway is very easy to setup, configure and customise. It has a great community support as well.
What do you dislike about the product?
Nothing specific as such. But logging features can be improved
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Centralized Authentication, Service Discovery, Security
Awesome product
What do you like best about the product?
Kong API gateway is an excellent product. It has many features that qualify it as the most trusted gateway. The thing which I like the most about this product is its beginner-friendly structure which makes it quite simple for first-timers to use it. Apart from that, the variety of features acts as a cherry on the cake.
What do you dislike about the product?
Although the API is good, it lends it down is its customer support. Dealing with connection-related issues can be cumbersome due to its poor customer service. I'd be happier if it's improved a little bit.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
I personally use it to manage multiple APIs and services required in my organization. Also, after using it for a while, I love the user interface and accessibility features that the product provides to the consumer.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
I would recommend this product to my colleagues and ask them to use it in implementing micro-services in their startups and business ventures.
A powerful product of API gateway
What do you like best about the product?
Its powerful and comprehensive features on API management.
What do you dislike about the product?
There are not enough online resources for the complicated scenario-based demo or troubleshooting.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
We use Kong API as an ingress controller with the Kubernetes platform and a tool for enterprise-level API management.
What we needed in a tool but with a little more.
What do you like best about the product?
AWS integration with many cloud tools...
What do you dislike about the product?
The setup was a bit difficult at times..
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Datacenter to AWS API gateway without the high bandwidth cost.
Mashape's Kong API cloud support is great.
What do you like best about the product?
I love the versatility of Kong. It pretty much will run on any platform and the price point from my understanding isn't that much as well. Great for all types of businesses.
What do you dislike about the product?
It is good for small APIs but the moment I tried to connect to a big one, it immediately started blocking.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
It manages multiple APIs at a very efficient way. I like the userface.
API Gateway for Lua Developers
What do you like best about the product?
Kong is wonderful if you enjoy Lua with Openresty and look to have an sll-in-one solution for API implementation and management. Lua is not as popular as it should be, but Openresty has proven performance and a strong community. For developers using either (likely both) technology, Kong is exciting and fun to implement.
Documentation is also spectacular. Many of the tools within their ecosystem is open source, and usage is free for smaller use cases. They are one of the biggest sponsors of Openresty, so the developer community is pretty active as well.
Documentation is also spectacular. Many of the tools within their ecosystem is open source, and usage is free for smaller use cases. They are one of the biggest sponsors of Openresty, so the developer community is pretty active as well.
What do you dislike about the product?
While Kong is great for implementation of API's, a more manual implementation using serverless is usually the path most devs go for. Kong's use case is a bit too specific to bring over most modern microservice devs to the table. This really limits Kong to just large enterprise contracts which likely do not have as large of a consumer base due to the usage of Lua.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
I found Kong looking for active products implementing Openresty. I assume 90% of kong's customers also do the same.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
serverless will be easier to hire developers for if you are looking for long-term implementations.
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