2016 is here, and as part of this year challenges I gave myself is “Spotlight”. Spotlight will be a series of (short) articles on tool/platform/project I use, most of the time open source, that deserve to be more popular. The article itself will be about what I found to be awesome in those tool/platform/project but also the limitations and issues I had with it.
In today’s Spotlight: Tyk
Introduction
Tyk is an open source API gateway in Go: it comes between your Server and your clients in order to modify and monitor the requests.
Availability
- Source Code: Tyk is open source and the code is available on github here
- On Premise: Installing Tyk on premise is not a one-liner but fairly well documented in the setup documentation
- SaaS: Multiple pricing, but the free-tier includes all the features and a few limits that you won’t reach that easly (e.g. 50k reqests daily).
Integration
I was expecting having to change a bunch of configs but actually you create an API pointing to your original API, and you request it instead. Done.
Awesome Features
This is not the complete list of features, just the one I really enjoyed.
- Analytics: how many times / what was requested / return code. This is great to see errors and usage.
- Security: Set a endpoint public or with login, set usage quotas and blacklist/whitelist endpoints.
- Endpoint Customization: You can modify headers, set caching or even mock an answer for each endpoints.
- Import: You can import your API definition from tools like Swagger, amazing to get started quickly.
Tyk also allows you to setup a Developer portal (with Doc / API keys and all the usual needed to manage it) but I haven’t tested that feature yet.
Limitations
I haven’t had any major issue with the platform, but Tyk is still in its early age and a few minor bugs may appear although the Github issue tracking seems quite reactive.
My main issue with the platform was the few amount of details provided in the analytics, there are definitely plenty of info but I can only know that there were X failed requests with error code xxx. I’d love to see the requests that have failed in details (Request/Response) to help the debugging.
Conclusion
I Think Tyk is a great platform for people who wants to get more out of their API. It might have a lot less value for those who use a BaaS which already provides analytics and API management.
That’s it for this Spotlight, check out tyk.io to know more about it. You have other similar platform or tools for a next Spotlight? Leave it in the comments!
Posted with : Spotlight
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