Best Open Source API Gateways to Consider

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and microservices have practically become standard in constructing sustainable modern applications. Microservices are driven by an open-source API gateway and specify how a customer can connect with and use the core service. Microservices are an architectural design that divides an app into discrete, self-contained, and accessible services/pieces.

APIs are now considered the cornerstone of digital transformation plans for corporations and other organizations. The popularity of open-source API gateway has led to an increase in the number of developers using API management tools to expose their APIs for use by internal and external programmers and other customers.

You can use an API management tool to:

• Provide managed APIs for microservices.
• To create APIs, combine many microservices.
• both external and internal microservices should be secured.
• expose archival services through current APIs.
• Acquire insights for businesses by using APIs and microservices, among other things.

For your business, are you looking for an open-source API management solution? Then keep reading as this article is just designed for you.

The best 10 API management tools and open-source API gateways for your IT infrastructure are listed below. Please remember that the list below is not arranged in any specific hierarchy.

Kong Gateway (OSS)

A well-liked, open-source, and sophisticated cloud-native API gateway with cross-platform compatibility is Kong Gateway (OSS). It was created using the Lua programming language, enables multi-cloud and hybrid architecture, and is designed with distributed and microservice architectures in mind.

Kong was designed from the ground up to be highly performant, extensible, and portable. Additionally, Kong is quick, scalable, and light. It exclusively supports native Kubernative CRDs, a declarative layout without a database, and in-memory storage.

In addition to monitoring the process, troubleshooting, caching, fault diagnosis and recovery, clustering, and load balancing (with various methods), Kong also offers logging, authentication (support for OAuth2.0), and rate-limiting, transformation, and many more capabilities. Importantly, Kong offers serverless operations and node clustering.

It allows you to set up proxies for your applications so they may be served via SSL or WebSockets. It may monitor the availability of your services, load balance traffic using copies of your upstream services, and make necessary adjustments.

Due to Kong's built-in command-line interface, you may also operate a Kong cluster via the command prompt. Kong is also quite extensible through the use of plugins and various connectors. Its RESTful API can be used to manage it for increased functionality.

Tyk

An open-source, robust, fast, and feature-packed API gateway, Tyk (pronounced Taik), was created utilizing the Go programming language from the ground up. It has an open-standards-based architecture that is easily expandable, pluggable, cloud-native, and extremely performant.

It simply needs Redis as data storage and is self-contained. It enables users to safely post and monitor numerous services, such as legacy, GraphQL and REST.

A wide range of authentication techniques, restrictions and rate-limiting, version control, monitoring, and analytics, notifications and events are just a few of the many features that Tyk comes pre-loaded with. Additionally, it supports virtual endpoints, on-the-fly transforms, and service discovery. It also enables the creation of mock APIs before their official release.

KrakenD

KrakenD is a stateless API gateway that is open-source, simple to use, and pluggable. It was also created in Go with performance in mind. It is portable and doesn't need a database to function. It is easy to configure and supports an infinite number of backends and endpoints.

Supervision, caching, user quotas, rate limits, quality of the service features including simultaneous calls and circuit breakers, granular timeouts and transformation, aggregation (merging sources), filtration, and decryption are all included in KrakenD. It offers security features like SSL and security policies and proxy services like protocol translation, load balancing, and Oauth.

Using the KrakenDesigner, a Graphical interface that enables you to graphically build your API from or resume a present one, you may manually or automatically set the API gateway behavior manually or automatically. Additionally, because of KrakenD's expandable architecture, additional functionality, plugins, integrated scripts, and middleware can be added without changing the program's source code.

Gravitee.io API Platform

Gravitee.io is an open-source, Java-based, user-friendly API gateway management tool that aids businesses in securing, publishing, analyzing, and documenting their APIs. 3 significant major modules are included, and they are as follows:

• Open Source Identity And Access Management (AM): is a flexible, lightweight, adaptable, and user-friendly solution. It uses the OAuth2/OpenID Connect protocols as an identity provider broker. It has a centrally located authentication and authorization server to protect your APIs and apps.
• API Management (APIM): is an open-source, straightforward yet effective, adaptable, portable, lightweight, and blazingly fast API management (APIM) solution created to provide your business complete control over who uses your APIs when they are accessed and how they are accessed.
• The Alert Engine (AE): module enables users to simply and effectively manage their API platforms by configuring alerts and receiving notifications. It also facilitates the detection of questionable conduct and multi-channel notifications.

Fusio

An open-source PHP-based API administration tool, Fusio is used to create and maintain REST APIs. This API management platform enables you to create API endpoints that can extract data from databases and modify them. It offers all the tools required to easily develop an API from various data sources and to produce unique replies.

It offers capabilities like rate-limiting, authorization, RPC support, validation, analysis, and user management and is used to expose Javascript applications, microservices, business functionality , and mobile apps.

Additionally, Fusio features a subscription layer to assist you in creating a pub/sub for your API and a straightforward payment system to charge for particular routes. It also allows OpenAPI creation and SDK creation.

Gloo Edge

Gloo Edge, which is also Go-based and open-source and built on top of the Envoy Proxy, is a feature-rich Kubernetes-native ingress controller and a cutting-edge cloud-native API gateway that supports microservices, legacy apps, and serverless. It also connects with your environment so you may select your own security, persistence, and scheduling tools.

It supports hybrid apps created using various technological devices, architectures, and interfaces running on various clouds and provides potent functional-level routing (allowing merging of traditional apps, microservices, and serverless).

Rate restriction, circuit breaking, login attempts, caching, external authentication, and authorization are among the API gateway functions that Gloo Edge enables. It also supports security, automated discovery, service-mesh integration, and transformations. 

WSO2 API Microgateway

WSO2 API Microgateway is a distributed, open-source, cloud-native API gateway for microservices. It streamlined the creation, deployment, and security of APIs within decentralized microservice frameworks and was mostly created using Java.

The WSO2 API Microgateway is a small, memory-efficient stateless container that enables the composition of numerous microservices using a single API and runtime service discovery. It converts legacy API forms (both requests and responses) to contemporary ones, making them accessible to contemporary consumer apps.

Developers can work together to create APIs using WSO2 API Microgateway's support for OpenAPI Specification (OAS) and then test such APIs on their own. Additionally, because it can operate independently and is not dependent on other components, it is highly scalable.

Goku API Gateway

Go was used to create the open-source, cloud-native Goku API Gateway microservice gateway. It functions as a platform for flow control, unified authentication, and cybersecurity; an API gateway for microservices architecture; an institutional OPEN API application framework; and a unified framework for third-party APIs.

It offers service orchestration, multi-tenancy control, high-performance HTTP forwarding and rerouting, API access control, and more. It offers hot updates, backend load balancing, API health assessment, API detaches and reconnect features, cluster installation, and dynamic resource registration.

A robust plugin system, built-in dashboards, and a CLI for starting, stopping, and reloading Goku from the command line are also included with Goku to make configuration simpler.

API Umbrella

An open-source API management tool called API Umbrella was primarily constructed with Ruby. You may build one public entry point to all your microservices and APIs with this proxy, regardless of where they are located. It sits in front of your APIs. It provides features like rate limitation, caching, analytics, and API keys.

It provides an Admin to control every part of API Umbrella, including user administration, API route settings, monitoring analytics, and much more. It also enables multi-tenancy. All administrative features within API Umbrella are also accessible via REST API.

Apiman

An open-source, Java-based API management solution called Apiman comes with a robust API design, configuration layer, and lightning-quick runtime. It is a self-contained system that may be used independently or integrated into already-existing systems and frameworks.

Its primary characteristics are full asynchronousness, a rich management layer, and policy-based runtime management for APIs. In addition to other functionalities, it provides throttling and limits, billing, centralized security, and metrics.