Kong
Last updated
Last updated
Kong is an proxy.
Kong acts as an API gateway, which as an entrance of API endpoints and pass them to dedicated servers (mostly internal network).
OpenResty(Nginx + Lua) as base for Nginx's proxy performance and Lua's additional feature on top of Nginx.
Lua for plugin scripting due to it's lightweight and embeddable.
Apache Cassandra or PostgreSQL as database due to performance and clustering.
Uses as router to forward the requests from client side to server side according to the endpoint/domain/hostname of request.
Additional function provided by plugin.
All configuration(routing) will synced along all nodes and clusters. i.e. scalable
RESTful API, although some open source projects provides GUI.
Due to build on top of Openresty(Nginx + Lua), it gets benefits from both application:
Fast. Benefit from Nginx and cache management of database.
Plugin available, which is Lua-scripted.
docker-compose up
-d flag may needed to detach the service.
Kong accepts HTTP API for administration.
8000 and 8443 are ports used for Kong proxy of HTTP and HTTPS respectively. 8001 and 8444 are HTTP/HTTPS Kong Admin API port.
2 type of format accepted for every Admin API:
application/x-www-form-urlencoded
This accepts the form input format. Dotted key needed for complex value input, e.g.:
config.limit=10&config.period=seconds
application/json
JSON format representation is easy for complex data.
More detailed reference
General name of upstream. e.g. product, API provider, microservice, etc.
Key attribute of Service is the URL (destination of the Service lies in, Kong will forward requests to there) which consists protocol, host, port and path.
Route defines the entrypoints of the Kong proxy.
Route must bind to an service, and the requests meets the conditions Route defined will be forwarded to the service it belongs.
Kong only accepts requests sent to Route, and proxies it to it's corresponding Service.
protocols, methods, hosts, paths identifies the entrypoints.
Indicates the user of Service.
Used to distinguish the requests into different users, Plugins may have further handling on this.
Plugin can use to intercept during HTTP request/response lifecycle.
Plugin can apply to Service, Route and/or Consumer, or apply it globally.
The plugins with more specific condition of API will have higher priority to execute.
One Plugin will be run only once per HTTP request/response.
Used to indicate public certificate/private key pair of SSL certificates.
Kong uses this to handle SSL/TLS termination for encrypted requests.
Mapping of hostnames to Certificate.
Hostname used to be upstream destination of Service. Can contain multiple for load balance.
It also contains Health Checker which monitors the Upstream is available to serve request or not.
IP address or hostname with a port that identifies an instance of a backend service.
Targets cannot be deleted or modified, only can be disabled.
Reference - https://docs.konghq.com/1.0.x/admin-api
Plugin for Kong - https://docs.konghq.com/hub/
Konga, the non-official GUI of Kong: