Kong (Mashape)

Overview

Secure, Manage & Extend your APIs and Microservices. The open-source management layer for APIs, delivering high performance and reliability.

Kong diagram

Features

Plugin architecture

  • Analytics - Plugins (Galileo), Logging, visualizations via proprietary tools
  • Availability - Failure Detection & Recovery
  • Community - Gelato
  • Deployment - Cloud, on-premise, hybrid (Docker, ...)
  • Documentation - Gelato
  • Load management - Traffic Control (Rate Limiting,...)
  • Security - Security (ACL, CORS,...)
  • Transformation - Request, Response transformations and Correlation ID

Licensing & Openness

  • Open source components released under Apache License 2.0
  • Some proprietary components include visual analytics

Community involvement

Kong has multiple channels for community engagement. In addition, there are many community resources and tools

Type of product

API Proxy

Lifecycle management

Designed as a proxy for existing API backends. Offers tools for the management lifecycle stage.

Programming languages / technologies

UI

Kong screenshot

3rd party packages

Kong dashboard kong dashboard screenshot

Strengths

  • Plugin architecture
  • mostly open-source

Weaknesses

Not fully open source, some plugins are commercial. E.g. visual analytics requires commercial subscription.