Amazon API Gateway
Fully managed service to create, publish, and secure APIs at any scale for backend access
KrakenD
Stateless, ultra‑high‑performance API gateway for microservices and secure communications
KrakenD CE delivers a stateless, high‑throughput API gateway that aggregates, transforms, and secures services, scaling linearly on any cloud or on‑prem environment with minimal resources.
Overview
Overview
KrakenD Community Edition is a stateless, high‑performance API gateway written in Go. It targets teams moving to microservices or implementing Backend‑for‑Frontend patterns, offering a declarative configuration that fits GitOps workflows.
Capabilities & Deployment
The gateway aggregates, filters, and transforms responses from multiple backends, supports XML↔JSON conversion, and enforces zero‑trust security policies such as OAuth, JWT, and CORS. Its design enables true linear scalability—each node runs independently, allowing horizontal scaling in Kubernetes, Docker, or bare‑metal environments without a single point of failure. Built‑in telemetry integrates with Prometheus, Datadog, Jaeger, and more, while extensibility is provided via Go plugins, Lua scripts, and CEL expressions.
Operational Efficiency
A single regular‑size instance can handle over 70 k requests per second while consuming under 50 MB of memory, reducing infrastructure costs and simplifying operations.
Highlights
Stateless design enables true linear scalability
Content aggregation, transformation, and filtering across multiple backends
Built‑in security features: OAuth, JWT, CORS, HSTS, etc.
Extensible via Go plugins, Lua scripts, and CEL expressions
Pros
- Ultra‑high request throughput with low memory footprint
- Declarative GitOps‑friendly configuration
- Platform‑agnostic: works on Kubernetes, Docker, or bare metal
- Rich telemetry integrations (Prometheus, Datadog, Jaeger)
Considerations
- Learning curve for complex routing configurations
- Limited UI; management via config files and APIs
- Advanced features may require custom plugins
- Community edition lacks some enterprise‑grade support
Managed products teams compare with
When teams consider KrakenD, these hosted platforms usually appear on the same shortlist.
Looking for a hosted option? These are the services engineering teams benchmark against before choosing open source.
Fit guide
Great for
- Teams adopting microservices needing a fast, stateless gateway
- Organizations that prefer declarative, GitOps‑driven API management
- Deployments where resource efficiency and low cost are critical
- Projects requiring extensive response aggregation and format conversion
Not ideal when
- Use cases demanding a full‑featured API management console out‑of‑the‑box
- Environments where a commercial SLA and dedicated support are mandatory
- Simple monolithic apps that don’t need aggregation or transformation
- Teams without Go development resources for custom plugin creation
How teams use it
Backend‑for‑Frontend aggregation
Combine data from multiple microservices into a single client‑optimized response, reducing round‑trips.
Legacy protocol translation
Transform XML responses from older services into JSON for modern front‑ends without code changes.
Zero‑trust API security
Enforce OAuth/JWT validation and CORS policies at the edge, protecting internal services.
Dynamic rate‑limiting and circuit breaking
Apply multi‑layer throttling to prevent overload and ensure graceful degradation under spikes.
Tech snapshot
Go84%
Makefile10%
Shell4%
Dockerfile1%
Frequently asked questions
How does KrakenD achieve high performance?
It is written in Go, operates statelessly, and performs concurrent calls to backends, allowing a single instance to handle >70k requests per second with <50 MB memory.
Can I run KrakenD in Kubernetes?
Yes, the gateway is container‑ready and can be deployed as a Deployment or DaemonSet, scaling horizontally without coordination.
What configuration format does KrakenD use?
A declarative JSON file defines endpoints, aggregations, security, and plugins, supporting GitOps workflows.
Is there support for monitoring?
KrakenD exports metrics to Prometheus and can push traces to Zipkin, Jaeger, or Datadog, and provides health endpoints.
Do I need to write Go code to extend functionality?
Extensions can be added via Go plugins, Lua scripts, or CEL expressions, so custom logic is possible without recompiling the core.
Project at a glance
Active- Stars
- 2,518
- Watchers
- 2,518
- Forks
- 485
LicenseApache-2.0
Repo age8 years old
Last commit5 days ago
Primary languageGo
Last synced yesterday