Krakend
Stateless, self-hosted API gateway designed for modern microservices. Offers enterprise-grade features with open source flexibility, trusted by thousands of teams worldwide.
Krakend is an open-source alternative to:
KrakenD is a stateless, high-performance API gateway built for modern microservices architectures. It acts as a single entry point for all your APIs, handling routing, load balancing, caching, and security while ensuring low latency and high throughput.
Key Features
- High Performance: Optimized for low latency and high throughput, handling thousands of requests per second.
- Stateless Design: Scales horizontally without session affinity, ideal for cloud-native environments.
- API Routing & Aggregation: Combine multiple backend APIs into a single endpoint with built-in aggregation.
- Security & Governance: Built-in authentication, rate limiting, JWT validation, and request/response transformation.
- Caching & Rate Limiting: Reduce backend load with configurable caching and rate limiting policies.
- Load Balancing: Distribute traffic across multiple backend instances for resilience and scalability.
- Observability: Comprehensive logging, metrics, and distributed tracing integration.
- Multi-Protocol Support: Works with REST, GraphQL, gRPC, WebSockets, and more.
- Enterprise Edition: Additional features like SLA-backed support, advanced security, and governance tools.
- AI Gateway: Specialized version for AI workloads with LLM routing, prompt guardrails, and token budget management.
Tech / Self-Hosting
KrakenD is open source (Community Edition) and self-hostable, available as a single binary or Docker container. The Enterprise Edition offers additional enterprise-grade features and support. Deployment options include on-premises, cloud, and air-gapped environments for maximum data sovereignty.