Microservice Proxy/Gateway Solutions
Kong, Traefik, Caddy, Linkerd, Fabio, Vulcand, and Netflix Zuul seem to be the most common in microservice proxy/gateway solutions. Kubernetes Ingress is often a simple Ngnix, which is difficult to separate the popularity from other things.
This is just a picture of this link from March 2, 2019
Originally, I had included some other solutions that have been declining in popularity, and some changed their github organization or repo. The Feb 24, 2018 chart is here and was just a picture of this link from Feb 24, 2018
A Service Mesh is related, but distinct from the concept of API gateways, edge proxies, and the enterprise service bus. The service mesh is a networking model that sits at a layer of abstraction above TCP/IP. A Service Mesh provides three benefits:
Lyft's Istio or Bouyant's Linkerd or Linkerd2 are examples of a Service Mesh, while Traefik, Envoy, Kong, Zuul, etc. are API Gateway implemented using Reverse Proxy. Before Linkerd/Istio/Linkerd2, large companies implemented the same functionality using fat client libraries.
In these systems, a generalized communication layer became suddenly relevant, but typically took the form of a “fat client” library—Twitter’s Finagle, Netflix’s Hysterix, and Google’s Stubby being cases in point.
Some of these gateways specialize in Edge features, while others are more suitable for internal routing.
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It is hard to seperate the popularity of the default example NGINX kubernetes ingress controller from the rest of kubernetes. Of the alternative implementations, this chart makes it look like coreos/alb-ingress-controller is the most popular for AWS.