API Gateway KrakenD Is Donated to Linux Foundation

KrakenD, an open-source framework for building application programming interface (API) gateways, has been donated to the Linux Foundation, which has dubbed it the Lura Project.

The move highlights the growing importance of API gateways to enterprise networks. It also spotlights the popularity of this particular solution.

“By being hosted at the Linux Foundation, the Lura Project will extend the legacy of the KrakenD open source framework and be better poised to support its massive adoption among more than one million servers every month,” said Albert Lombarte, CEO of the KrakenD company, in a statement.

Lombarte said the speedy uptake of the KrakenD engine is one reason why it’s being donated to the Lura Project now. KrakenD was designed to be open source from the start, he said, and just over the last month, the company has seen server implementations double to 1.8 million worldwide.

Lombarte also would like to see what more can be done with the technology, without the restrictions of specific vendors.

“We want the project to stay open source and not be influenced by marketing,” he noted.

KrakenD’s History

The startup called KrakenD launched four years ago in Barcelona, Spain. The founding team created a stateless API gateway written in the Go language that is distinguished by performance and the ability to aggregate microservices, irrespective of their origin. “We work with more than Kubernetes,” says Lombarte. The company describes the product as being able to “[m]erge many calls into one.”

That capability has attracted customers looking to transition from monolithic to microservices development, and also those looking to streamline huge numbers of microservices, Lombarte said.

At least one of KrakenD’s customer/partners, an e-commerce company called Hepsiburada, based in Turkey, says the ability to aggregate microservices was a key feature in adopting the technology. “[W]e have a massive amount of traffic and a complex ecosystem of around 500 microservices and different datacenters,” said Apler Hankendi, the company’s engineering director, in a statement. “Adding KrakenD to our Kubernetes clusters has helped us reduce the technical and organizational challenges of dealing with a vast amount of resources securely and easily. We have over 800 containers running with KrakenD and [we are] looking forward to [having] more.”

KrakenD’s Context and Future

Though KrakenD’s engine has been donated to the broader development community, the company will continue to serve customers with its value-added technology that expands and extends the API gateway. “We take the Lura engine and add many components,” said Lombarte.

KrakenD has a growing number of competitors, as API gateways have become key to enterprise networking. Among the pack is Kong, the late-stage startup that scored $100 million in Series D funding in February 2021, as well as a range of products from major cloud players, such as Amazon’s API Gateway, Google’s Apigee X, Microsoft’s Azure API Management, and Salesforce’s MuleSoft.

There also are multiple markets forming around the API gateway trend, as demonstrated by the recent purchase of API gateway security startup CloudVector by Imperva.

KrakenD is the latest high-profile technology to be contributed to the nonprofit Linux Foundation, which boasts thousands of developers working on 200 open-source projects, including network operating system DENT, the Community Health Analytics Open Source Software (CHAOSS), and AsyncAPI, among many others.

With open source helping to define IT markets, it’s likely the Lura Project will be cropping up in a range of products as API gateways continue to proliferate in the enterprise environment.