8 Open-Source API Management Tools and Gateways

APIs are an integral part of software/application development. They are present in almost every kind of app and enable communication between two application programs. APIs help developers in building apps that cater to the diverse needs of users and customers.

For businesses and organizations, APIs have become the core of digital transformation strategies. The rise in the usage of APIs has surged the use of API management solutions by developers to publish their APIs to external developers, internal developers as well as other partners.

Also Read: What is API Testing? Types and Benefits

An API management tool can help you with certain things, some of which are listed below-

1. Expose microservices as managed APIs.

2. Apply security to internal and external microservices.

3. Expose legacy services as modern APIs.

API development is difficult, and managing it adds one more layer to the difficulty level. The ideal thing to do would be to use open-source API management platforms.

Let’s take a look at some of the major open-source API management tools and gateways.

1. API Umbrella

API Umbrella is a proxy that helps manage APIs and Microservices. This open-source API management platform can add common functionality like API keys, rate limiting, and analytics to any API. An admin web interface is also generated through the API umbrella which can be initiated via the tool’s own API. This tool makes life easier for both API creators as well as API consumers.

API Umbrella allows multiple organizations to operate under the same umbrella as it possesses the ability to assign different admin permissions for different domains.

2. Gravitee.io

Based on Java, Gravitee.io is an easy-to-use API management platform that helps organizations analyze, secure, publish, and document their APIs. It offers plenty of features which include rate limiting, load balancing, IP filtering, cross-origin resource sharing along with a developer portal with OAuth2 and JSON web token policies.

Gravitee.io consists of three key modules which are API Management (APIM), Access Management (AM), and Alert Engine (AE). The first one is a simple and lightweight yet powerful and flexible API Management solution that provides your organization with complete control over who accesses your API, and when, and how. Access Management is based on OAuth2/OpenID Connect protocols and acts as an Identity provider broker. It makes use of a centralized Authentication and Authorization service to secure your applications and APIs. Speaking of Alert Engine, it’s a module that enables configuration and notification alerts, and lets users manage their API platform easily and efficiently. It supports suspicious behavior detection, multi-channel notifications, etc.

3. Tyk.io

Tyk is a powerful API gateway written in the Go programming language and is used for on-premises API management. It features a dashboard for API analytics and consists of a developer portal with documentation, rate-limiting for APIs, version control, authentication, and several other features designed with a focus on microservices environment and containerization.

Tyk is an independent gateway and only requires Redis as a data store. It helps users securely publish, and manage a range of services such as legacy, REST, and GraphQL.

One of its downsides is its disclaimer that commercial services must upgrade to paid versions, otherwise, it is highly beneficial for non-profit projects.

4. Kong

Kong is a popular open-source microservices API gateway built for universal deployment. It is platform-agnostic and can be easily installed in multiple operating environments including Docker, Kubernetes, OSX, and CentOS. It is written in the Lua programming language and supports hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructure.

Kong provides a variety of microservices management features, such as WebSockets, great visualization for monitoring, ease of one-click operations, and common language infrastructure capability. It is widely adopted by enterprises and gets good community support.

5. KrakenD

KrakenD is a simple and pluggable API gateway designed with stateless architecture. It is also written in the Go programming language. It can run everywhere and requires no database for that matter. It has a very straightforward configuration and supports countless endpoints and backends.

KrakenD comes with a plethora of features such as caching, monitoring, user quota, rate limiting, aggregation, decoding, and filtering. Load balancing and Protocol transformation are some of the proxy features it offers.

One can configure the API gateway behavior using KrakenDesigner, which is a GUI that lets visually design APIs from scratch or resume an existing one. Moreover, with KrakenD’s extensible architecture, one can add extra plugins, functionalities, embedded scripts, and middlewares without having to modify the source code.

6. APIman

APIman is an open-source, Java-based API management tool that comes with a rich API design and provides a configuration layer that emphasizes quick runtimes, offering policy-based governance with a detachable policy engine, a REST API for management, asynchronous capability, rate limiting, etc. It is a standalone system that can be either run as a separate system or embedded within existing frameworks and platforms.

The key features of APIman include flexibility and policy-based runtime governance for APIs, a rich management layer, and it is fully asynchronous. It supports throttling and quotas, centralized security, billing and analytics options, and plenty of other features.

7. WSO2 API Microgateway

WSO2 API Microgateway is a cloud-native, developer-centric, and decentralized API gateway for microservices. It is built mostly using Java and streamlines the process of creating, deploying, and securing APIs within distributed microservice architectures.

This is a lightweight stateless container comprising low memory footprints, that supports composing multiple microservices through a single API and also supports runtime service discovery. It allows for transforming legacy API formats (both requests and responses) to modern ones, to expose them to modern consumer apps.

Because WSO2 API Microgateway uses OpenAPI Specification (OAS), it enables developers to collaborate in creating APIs and then test them independently. Furthermore, it is highly scalable as it can run in isolation without being dependent on other components.

Features include rate-limiting, service discovery, request and response transformation, load balancing, failover, and circuit breaking, seamless Docker and Kubernetes integration among others.

8. Fusio

Another open-source option that you can look for API management is Fusio. Based on PHP, Fusio allows API construction from various data types. It provides all the necessary tools for not only quick API development from different data sources but also to create fully customized responses. Fusio comes with lifecycle management features such as a back-end dashboard for admin control. It also includes developer portals, documentation, authorization, RPC support, JSON validation for incoming requests, rate limiting, and scope handling to match user permissions.

One of its unique abilities is subscription; Fusio can be used to implement pub/sub-style subscription services. Fusio encompasses a command-line client that lets you directly interact with the API and deploy specific YAML configuration files.

Summing Up

For public-facing services, partner integrations, and even internal services within organizations, streamlining the management side of web APIs is a smart move to save effort and avoid reinventing the wheel.

Building upon open source can safeguard the longevity of an API management solution since the tools are free from lock-in. This helps empower API owners with security and the ability to evolve the software long term. Avoiding subscription fees, open source can also help make startups leaner, or help enterprises cut costs.