API Management System
Without over-simplifying things, an API Gateway is not much more than a reverse proxies with a lot of customizations and flexibility. An API Gateway acts as an API frontend that orchestrates API Requests, enforces traffic policies (i.e. throttling, caching), security policies (i.e. authorization, authentication), gathers analytics on traffic, and orchestrates transformation engines for modifying requests/responses on the fly.
As such, an API Gateway is usually seen as the entry point for communication between the external requests and the internal services, hence its name. Using an API Gateway internally, however, can facilitate great rewards in terms of the standardization of policies.
An API Management System (like Dynalight) is more than just an API Gateway. It contains all of the pieces to the puzzle that enable an organization to hit the ground running while exposing API’s to their consumers.
Dynalight combines the Kong Community Edition API gateway, and a developer portal, management portal, logging, monitoring, analysis and more to match the functionalities of Kong Enterprise Edition at a much lower cost.
Why did we select Kong Community Edition as the engine for our Dynalight product and not any other API Gateway? The answer is quite simple. As Thibault Charbonnier, one of the original developers of Mashape (the original name of Kong) explains, ‘We wanted to build a modulable reverse proxy (on top of Nginx) that would handle features that are common between APIs (authentication, logging, rate-limiting…). We had two ways to do that: by bundling Nginx with our own flavour of 3rd party modules (the said plugins), or by developing on top of OpenResty. We admired the work done on OpenResty and thought of a way to build a modulable core, on which plugins could be added. Hence, Kong is mostly a collection of Lua scripts that allow it to add services (APIs…) at runtime, and the execution of plugins on top of those.’
As a result of this, Kong CE is scalable, customisable, flexible and extendable. And, extending it is exactly what we did!
