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Comment by trpc | Hacker News Reader

neither Kong nor its infrastructure (i.e. nginx) have any future on the long term against envoy. Simply time is against them even if it is going to be very slow downfall. I guess that's the real reason nginx sold itself right in the peak of the economic cycle and before envoy gets the sufficient popularity

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Based only on technical merits I agree; Envoy and other API type software/service should probably eat its lunch. At most enterprises though nobody will have heard of Envoy though and I don't know of anyone selling directly to enterprise in this space. However, investing in enterprise infrastructure software is hardly about tech at somme point. The investors must really like Kong's enterprise sales team.

there are already a handful commercial Envoy-based k8s ingress controllers

At Kong we actually like Envoy a lot, because we can deliver our superset features and ecosystem on top of any underlying proxy (NGINX, Envoy or anything that can process a stream or bytes).

That's what I thought you would do anyway whenever nginx loses its place in favor of Envoy not only because its obvious technical superiority but also its licensing situation, congratulations on making money off other people's work

We have been contributing back to the community with open-source projects and improvements to the other open-source projects we utilize, and using respectfully “other people’s work” in agreement to their licenses. Kong itself is open-source, and we have a long history of contributing back.

Disclosure I work at Kong

The comparison doesn’t fully translate because Envoy is a proxy, and Kong is a control platform that comes built on top of a proxy. We actually love envoy here, and think it’s a great product. The value that Kong brings is more up the information and abstraction stack versus just the core proxy we’re built on, which is rapidly becoming commoditized.

Hi. Not OP, but thanks for your great answers !

Does Kong compare more to Istio then (which as far as I understand is a control layer over Envoy), but less focused on K8s ?

Kong would be more comparably to Istio, yes and we're big fans of it! We provide additional control capabilities on top of what Istio provides and can integrate with Istio for folks using it. Basically, if you're using Istio for a mesh, and you want to have that mesh also work with all your other non-mesh services, we help make that happen.

You can also use Kong as an ingress controller for K8s or inject it as a sidecar proxy in K8s, which would give you very similar capabilities to using Envoy + Istio.

Also, you are quite welcome!

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