Gravitee: Open-Source API Gateway - <AUTHOR> https://gravitee.io <comment><USER2> Trying it out now. For those who have already: how does Gravitee compare w/ Apigee, Kong, API Gateway etc.

<comment><USER3> From what I gather in the GitHub repository, they implement their own L7 management, instead of using NGINX, Envoy, HAProxy, etc. IMO, this adds quite a bit of development cost with minimum benefit.

Kong has built on OpenResty (which is built on NGINX), Ambassador has been built on Envoy Proxy -- I think these projects will be able to sustain their velocity more so than projects that need to maintain their own L7 engine. Just watching the speed at which Envoy Proxy is adding stuff is kind of staggering; hard to imagine how another company could do the same on their own homegrown engine.

<comment><USER4> Tyk runs its own L7 engine, mainly around primitives provided by the Golang stdlib, IMO having full control over this part provides a lot more flexibility than sitting on top of someone else's stack, bugs are faster to eke out and optimisation doesn't rely on upstream code.

(Caveat: I'm the CEO of Tyk)

<comment><USER5> Sorry for asking simple questions.

Can someone tell us what exactly is L7 ?

It seems like I cannot find any information when googling it.

<comment><USER5> For those interested, "L7 engine" seems to be the "application layer" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_layer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_layer) in the OSI model [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model)

So communication protocol such as gRPC and HTTP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why none of these API gateways offer monetization out of the box? I'm curious. Is that a not well-demanded feature?

I have researched a lot of them and none have a straight way to do metered billing and if they somehow do, they are prohibitively expensive.

Does somebody know of an API gateway solution that offers this?

<comment><USER7> Billing is a hard issue since there is no common API to do that. All payment gateways are different. And what is most important, it lot of cases it requires some application logic, on how exactly you want to bill the user: for example partly static, partly dynamic.

What API gateway can do, is to provide you with a way to set a quota for a given user, track analytics, and have it all accessed in a programmatic way, so with a few API queries, you can know how much to bill the user. At least that's how most of the Gateways, like Tyk, do.

<comment><USER8> I think key issue here is that legacy api management solutions lock you into their billing flows and providers. An open SRC gateway like Tyk will give you freedom to use your own billing solution and define your own verticals at expense of slightly more complexity at integration/implementation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Throwing my hat in the ring. Micro provides an API gateway that routes dynamically via service discovery. It's written in Go and includes a surrounding toolkit of useful features. It's also entirely pluggable. [https://github.com/micro/micro](https://github.com/micro/micro)

</comment><comment><USER10> Hi, I'm Nicolas (CEO of GraviteeSource, the company behind Gravitee.io).

We provide a full featured api management platform (gateway, dev portal, analytics, ...).

We use Eclipse Vert.x and every plugin is written in java.

The comparison between Gravitee and other competitors depends on your use case (saas/onprem/hybrid, features ootb, api gateway or api management, ...).

If you have specific concerns, please ask.

</comment><comment><USER11> Running these api gateways on your own is very complex, especially when they need to be open publicly. Typically you'd want to layer a WAF and a CDN on top of them, which already come with their own api gateway like features (eg AWS cloudfront).

My question - what do people use these for?

<comment><USER12> API Gateways back in the days were primarily being adopted at the edge for external traffic, but they are increasingly being used internally to connect teams/products together, or in a Service Mesh deployment pattern for microservices. Solutions provided by cloud vendors are generally not well suited for all the N-S and E-W use-cases that typically an organization requires, they are usually slow (which in turn prevents more decoupled and traffic intensive architectures from working well), provide little extensibility options and while are every cheap to get up and running with, they also get expensive very quickly as traffic increases exponentially.

Disclaimer: I am CTO of Kong [1].

[1] [https://konghq.com](https://konghq.com)

<comment><USER13> Yeah, my current project is using an internal / external api gateway style. You run into so many issues... You kinda want to run away (beside performance) it is super hard to actually manage / govern etc..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is this something like an implementation of Googles beyondcorp model? [https://beyondcorp.com/](https://beyondcorp.com/)

<comment><USER15> I'd say it's lower in the stack, and probably for a different audience. If you really wanted to, you can probably implement BeyondCorp using (but not only using) this or one of its competitors mentioned in this thread; but it's only part of the equation and leaves out the authorization logic of BeyondCorp.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This seems geared towards REST APIs. I would love something similar with good GraphQL support

<comment><USER13> Second this! It is still rarely used. But it's usage is growing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Not speaking about the project itself, but since when did 100% Open Source become a thing?

<comment><USER18> Kong has Community Edition and an Enterprise Edition with non-free/proprietary features (same model as MySQL, Nginx, GitLab, & Redis). It's called the open- core model. Company is signaling that it intends to offer all features open source and without restriction.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open- core_model](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-core_model)

<comment><AUTHOR> the evil is in the details so it really depends on the boundary where the core is defined at, in nginx/mysql's case, the core is large enough for 99% small players, and the big players are willing to pay and the income is enough to sustain the projects. I somehow feel Kong's core is a bit limited which is how I found out Gravitee.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I don't get the idea of API Gateway. Is it to secure, or reuse code logic, or load balance ??? Because as i see, gateway is the central point of downtime of the whole system.

</comment><comment><USER20> Http API? When a GRPC one?

</comment><comment><USER21> Wso2 has a fully ASLv2 licensed API management solution which also includes a high performance gateway. It has monetization items included. Deployed to 1000s of accounts and running some environments with billions of transactions a day. Excited to take a look at this new entrant.</comment>