In recent times, technology has transformed our world and day-to-day living style. From computers to smartwatches, we have come a long way. APIs are one of them that help technologies to serve smooth experiences and enhance human interaction with web services.
Today, APIs are the crux of any web and mobile application development project. Open-source technology makes API management systems more flexible, innovative, and robust.
Open-Source API is leveraged by software developers and web development companies so that they can integrate with open-source services and data.
An Open-Source API is an integration tool that functions by connecting developers to an Open Source or public.
It consists of many open projects that developers can integrate to build applications.
Uses of “OPEN-SOURCE APIs”:
- It eases communication with each other over internal networks and the Internet.
- In this way, they have been a bridge between the enterprise and the partners, suppliers, customers, and other 3rd parties in the chain.
The 10 most popular OPEN-SOURCE APIs that are useful in integrating Open-Source products and services
1. Kong Gateway (OSS):
Kong Gateway is one of the popular cloud-native and open-source API gateway that is coded in the Lua programming language.
“Lue is a lightweight and high-level scripting language that can be embeddable in applications. It supports multiple programming methods i.e,
- object-oriented
- data-driven programming
- functional programming
- procedural programming”
When it comes to getting high performance and portability, the Kong Gateway API works the best. Kong Gateway makes tasks simple and easily manages all the hassle of API management. Also, it provides features like live monitoring, upstreams, service discovery, certificates, caching, failure detection & recovery, clustering, and load balancing, logging, authentication (support for OAuth2.0), rate-limiting, transformations, and lots more.
Kong supports hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructure, multiple api documentation template making it fast, flexible, and scalable.
2. Goku API Gateway:
Goku is a Go lang-based API gateway that supports microservices architecture. It has a built-in GUI feature, CLI, and a powerful plug-in system that enhances its functionality.
Goku API Gateway provides many functions such as data processing, dynamic routing, service orchestration, load balancing, multi-tenancy management, rich traffic management, protocol conversions, identity authentication, service discovery, API access control, and many more.
Goku API Gateway supports cluster deployment and dynamic service registration functionalists like backend load balancing, API health check, and API disconnect-reconnect. It continuously gets updates of configurations without affecting nodes’ processing.
Benefits of Goku API Gateway:
- Low usage and maintenance cost
- High scalability
- 50% faster than Nginx and Kong
- Fully open source
- Rich features – clustering, hot updates, alerting, logging
- Quickly and easily connect with third-party tools such as
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3. KrakenD:
KrakenD is a high-performant open-source API gateway that helps to adopt microservices easily. It works as an aggregator for Create API and combines multiple microservices into single endpoints.
KrakenD, open source API, focuses on performing difficult tasks such as decode, transform, aggregate and auth. Creating an endpoint gives a declarative way and doesn’t require any programming language.
To provide a combined and seamless experience to users, KrakenD API collects all API requests from clients and finds out the required services. Its features include caching, monitoring, user quota, rate limiting, transformation, aggregation, filtering, and decoding. It provides multiple proxies and securities features.
Proxy feature:
- load balancing
- protocol translation
- auth
Security feature:
- SSL
- Security policies
To configure the behavior of the API gateway, you can use KrakenDesigner. It’s a GUI that helps you to design your API visually and continue with an existing one. The extensible architecture of KrakenD, empowers you to perform additional functionalities without changing the source code.
4. API Umbrella:
API Umbrella is a Ruby-based open-source API management platform that helps you to manage APIs and microservices. It makes life easier for both API creators and consumers.
- For API creators, it standardizes APIs and makes them scalable.
- For API consumers, makes it easy to access all APIs using the same key and provides standardized documentation.
One of the best things about this open source API is that it allows you to operate multiple organizations under one umbrella. It supports multi-tenancy and has an Admin to control every element of API Umbrella, including user management, API routing settings, viewing analytics, and more. All administrative features are accessible via REST API under API Umbrella.
Real-time analytics, rate limiting, caching, rate restriction, and API keys are the key facilities of the API umbrella.
5. APIMAN:
The best and top-rated API management platform developed by Red Hat. APIman is an open-source and Java-based API management platform that works independently or can be integrated with existing frameworks and platforms.
The interesting thing, this is the only API that helps you to add additional access and control functionality to an API service. From filtering IPs to adding authentication, controlling user access, limiting the requests, and analyzing usage metrics, you can use this API in various ways.
It has many features like,
- Govern Your API
- Rich Management Layer
- Fully Asynchronous
- Easily Embeddable
6. GitLab API:
A platform for developers to collaborate on coding projects is called GitLab. GitLab GraphQL API is now accessible. Many of the operations that we frequently carry out while utilizing the user interface are also possible with the GitLab API.
We can automate the procedure and do away with all user contact by using the API. Under this Open-Source API, developers can publish and retrieve issues, manage projects, and retrieve and manage users using the GitLab REST API.
7.WSO2 API Microgateway:
The WSO2 API Microgateway is a small, memory-efficient stateless container that enables the composition of numerous microservices using a single API. It also supports runtime service discovery. It converts legacy API forms (both requests and responses) to the latest ones, revealing them to the latest consumer apps.
The WSO2 API Microgateway simplifies developing, installing, and securing APIs for microservice architecture. It has more benefits like:
- It can operate alone and is not dependent on any other components
- It is very scalable.
- Help developers collaborate in API creation and can freely test.
- It also seamlessly integrates Docker and Kubernetes.
- It has mutual TLS, OAuth2.0, API keys, based authentication & authorization.
Its key features are rate limiting, service discovery, load balancing, request and response transformation, and circuit breaker.
8. Gravitee.io:
A Java-based open source API management platform that assists businesses in securing, publishing, analyzing, and documenting their APIs. It’s very flexible and lightweight in nature that has amazing features such as:
- IP filtering
- Rate limiting
- Plug-and-play options
- Load balancing
- Cross-origin resource sharing
API management, access management, and alert engine are three main modules of the Gravitee API platform.
- API management (APIM) is an open-source, straightforward yet effective, adaptable, lightweight, and blazingly fast solution that gives you complete control of your APIs.
- Access Management (AM) is an open-source identity and access management solution that provides users custom authentication and authorization flow. It gives you visibility to monitoring logins, sign-ups, and other action metrics. The access management console is adaptable, lightweight, versatile, and simple to use. It empowers you to create a centralized and strong single sign-on feature for all customers.
- Alert Engine (AE) is a module that enables users to quickly and easily configure alerts and receive notifications to prevent suspicious attempts.
9. Fusio:
The most popular open-source API management solution among developers. It’s a PHP-based API platform that helps developers to create and manage REST APIs using various data types. It allows the creation of API endpoints to request and transform data from the database. You can quickly develop API and customize their responses using this API management platform. Even you can build API endpoints without having much coding experience using the Fusio API platform.
It works as a bridge between your internal API and microservices. Also, you can charge your users for API calls.
It has handy features like the dashboard for controlling admins, in-depth documentation, JSON validation for incoming requests, rate-limiting, authorization, RPC support, analytics, and managing the user permissions.
10. Tyk:
Tyk is the best cloud-native API management tool for developers. Tyk is an open-source, powerful, API gateway management tool written in the Go programming language. It requires Redis as a data store to run and can handle 50,000 requests daily. Tyk helps to connect RESTful APIs to each other that’s why it is also described as “the thing that connects the thing to the other thing”.
It connects systems and services quickly and creates secure and scalable business APIs. You can analyze, manage and view your all insights from a single dashboard in Tyk. It has both free and paid versions.
It has amazing features such as rate-limiting, version control, authentication methods, notifications and events, monitoring, and analytics.
Closing words
Today, open-source technology is getting popular in the IT world. Nowadays, most web and mobile app development companies provide some sort of open-source services. In the coming future, we will see more and more open-source technologies.
So, what are you waiting for? Try these demanding open-source API gateways and find out the best one for your business. Now, move on to the next step and hire a web and mobile app development company to help you integrate these open-source APIs into your project.
I Hope, these open-source API management platforms we have shared will add value to your software development projects.
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