Kong, Traefik, Caddy, Linkerd, Fabio, Vulcand, and Netflix Zuul seem to be the most common in microservice proxy/gateway solutions. Kubernetes Ingress is often a simple Ngnix, which is difficult to separate the popularity from other things.
This is just a picture of this link from March 2, 2019
Originally, I had included some other solutions that have been declining in popularity, and some changed their github organization or repo. The Feb 24, 2018 chart is here and was just a picture of this link from Feb 24, 2018
A Service Mesh is related, but distinct from the concept of API gateways, edge proxies, and the enterprise service bus. The service mesh is a networking model that sits at a layer of abstraction above TCP/IP. A Service Mesh provides three benefits:
- security (TLS for service to service authentication)
- intelligent traffic management (proxy, deployed as a sidecar to the relevant service)
- visibility (monitoring and tracing for troubleshooting and debugging)
Lyft's Istio or Bouyant's Linkerd or Linkerd2 are examples of a Service Mesh, while Traefik, Envoy, Kong, Zuul, etc. are API Gateway implemented using Reverse Proxy. Before Linkerd/Istio/Linkerd2, large companies implemented the same functionality using fat client libraries.
In these systems, a generalized communication layer became suddenly relevant, but typically took the form of a “fat client” library—Twitter’s Finagle, Netflix’s Hysterix, and Google’s Stubby being cases in point.
Some of these gateways specialize in Edge features, while others are more suitable for internal routing.
More Articles:
- What is a Service Mesh and Why Do I Need One
- So what even is a Service Mesh? Hot take on Istio and Linkerd
- Pivotal and Istio: Advancing the Ecosystem for Microservices in the Enterprise
- Linkerd and Istio: Like Peanut Butter and Jelly
- Lyft Envoy Comparison to alternatives
- Introduction to modern network load balancing and proxying
It is hard to seperate the popularity of the default example NGINX kubernetes ingress controller from the rest of kubernetes. Of the alternative implementations, this chart makes it look like coreos/alb-ingress-controller is the most popular for AWS.
