AWS offers its own out-of-the-box API gateways. For many AWS teams, AWS API Gateways are a natural place to start when beginning their API management and API gateway journeys. However, as API practices and programs begin to scale, many organizations begin to look beyond AWS due to major limitations, feature gaps, performance issues, and cost-effectiveness challenges.
What some organizations don’t know is that Kong, like AWS, has an AWS-native API platform offering that provides self-serve dedicated cloud gateways in AWS cloud (deployed and managed in Kong’s AWS VPC), the ability to use AWS cloud spend to acquire the Kong API platform for AWS, and comes with many important products and features that AWS currently lacks.
To help your evaluation process, we’ve written this in-depth comparison and guide that walks through the major differences between the two solutions as they pertain to core, enterprise API management, and API platform use cases.
We’ve organized this blog by covering how AWS and Kong compare across three core sets of requirements when building out your API Platform and API program:
We hope this is helpful. Please reach out if you have any questions.
This use case is where many AWS teams feel that AWS has an edge over the rest of the market. AWS makes it very easy to get API gateway infrastructure spun up in your AWS public cloud region of choice.
However, Kong Konnect’s Dedicated AWS Cloud Gateways also offer this same level of ease of use — plus much more enterprise-grade functionality and minus the performance and stability issues that typically come with trying to use AWS API Gateway at scale.
Below, we'll look at different functionality and discuss why it matters and the differences and similarities between AWS and Kong offerings.
Why it matters: While both solutions offer self-serve AWS-cloud-ready API gateways, AWS will require you to be locked into AWS only on a go-forward basis. Kong offers all of the benefits on the AWS side, while also opening up the possibility to go multi-cloud with self-serve support for Azure and GCP cloud gateways as well.
Why it matters: API gateways are critical infrastructure that you can’t afford to have go down. Both vendors offer a robust three 9s SLA here to bolster confidence when offloading API runtime infrastructure management onto a third party.
Why it matters: API gateways protect critical API assets and data, so they must be secure. Both vendors meet stringent security and compliance standards.
Why it matters: Deployment flexibility is essential for complying with data regulations and meeting stringent performance and high availability requirements. When working with multi-region deployments, you need to ensure consumers are being routed to the gateway that minimizes latency and performance impacts.
Why it matters: APIs are the backbone of modern applications. Performance bottlenecks and technical constraints at the gateway level will result in poor user experiences.
If rolling out a platform across your entire enterprise, your API platforms must offer engineering teams the API solutions and tooling needed for building, running, discovering, and governing APIs.
AWS API Gateway offers the bare minimum API gateway features, but they're missing core functionality around security, analytics, and more. Read on the learn more.
Why it matters: When implementing an enterprise-wide API platform, platform teams want a solution that will not limit them when it comes to the kinds of APIs and data sources they can expose.
Why it matters: API platform rollouts won’t be successful if those platforms can't meet the needs of all stakeholders. AWS’ limitations around gateway policies will result in certain API security, reliability, and governance use cases not being satisfied without bringing on another.
Why it matters: A flexible and battle-tested security offering is a cornerstone of any enterprise API gateway. The offering should adhere to and remain up to date with industry standards and best practices while also being flexible enough to integrate with an organization’s identity and access management platform of choice.
Why it matters: One of the core benefits of implementing an enterprise gateway is increased visibility into all aspects of your API operations to easily identify long-term trends and reduce time to resolution for any incident.
As more and more platform teams take over API management responsibilities, we see a shift within organizations from looking at the API jobs to be done as “API management” to incorporating API management into larger API platform initiatives.
Best-in-class API platforms follow four main principles:
While both AWS and Kong offer self-serve access to provision API gateways in AWS cloud environments, that's basically where the parity ends. Kong has invested in building a larger platform around your API infrastructure in AWS, giving your organization everything it needs to implement a secure API platform for building, running, discovering, and governing your APIs.
Why it matters: Federated platforms must offer distributed engineering teams, such as Rabobank’s, to self-serve their own API infrastructure.
Why it matters: Organizations often have multiple API runtime infrastructure requirements. While an API gateway may satisfy some of them, service mesh is the gold standard for service-to-service communication, and only Kong offers a platform that enables self-serve service mesh and API gateway provisioning.
Why it matters: Having an ingress controller that can be managed as part of your API platform means you can have confidence that your API platform will always offer the best possible Kubernetes runtime infrastructure.
Why it matters: A developer portal is table stakes for any enterprise-grade API platform. Organizations need a portal that accelerates time to market by supporting multiple API protocols, works across clouds and runtimes, enables self-service onboarding, and provides unified analytics to drive API reuse and governance.
Why it matters: If you don’t know which APIs and services are running, how they are secured and made reliable, and who owns them, it’s impossible to know whether your API landscape is actually secure, reliable, and performant.
Why it matters: An Admin API is typically the first place organizations start when automating their API management operations. Without a properly documented, fully featured Admin API, infrastructure and platform teams will struggle to implement APIOps effectively.
Why it matters: For teams that want to manage their API platform declaratively — just like they do the rest of their K8s infrastructure — a Kubernetes operator is essential. However, if the operator does not support all of the platform’s critical functionality, Kubernetes teams will never be able to make their APIOps truly Kube-native.
Why it matters: While declarative config via the Kubernetes operator is one way to do declarative management, it’s not the only way. Kong gives platform teams the ability to automate their API platform however works best for their organization.
While AWS API Gateways provide a solid starting point for API management, organizations looking to scale their API practices efficiently may find themselves facing limitations. Kong's AWS-native API platform emerges as a powerful alternative, offering Dedicated Cloud Gateways, the ability to leverage AWS cloud spend, and a suite of features absent in AWS's offering.
Ready to elevate your API management strategy? Discover how Kong can transform your organization. Contact us to schedule a demo to see Kong in action. Don't let the limitations of your current API gateway hold you back — explore the possibilities with Kong now.
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