Currently envoyproxy/gateway is still at early stage. It only supports configuring via file or k8s crds, and many things especially docs are not clear.
Claim: I am the core developer of APISIX, and I am also the core developer of OpenResty (known as Nginx + Lua). I have written Go for several years and I have contributed to github.com/golang/go.
We have done some benchmarks around APISIX, Kong, Tyk. APISIX is the fastest (APISIX > Kong > Tyk).
All of them have rich features and fantasy GUI.
If people really care about the performance, it would be good to consider APISIX. Remember to benchmark every candidates in your own environment, even if you do not benchmark them correctly (every vendor complains others can't do benchmark correctly, some even don't allow others to do benchmark[1][2]), it is the way you use them in the production.
Advertisement time is over. Let's talk something irrelevant to my employer.
If you care about performance, forget about writing a plugin with a guest language. A guest language is a language doesn't supported by the gateway natively, like Go in Kong and Lua in Tyk. The performance waste in ctx serialization and IPC are huge. I have seen these complains for more than one.
> Imagine how many crazy long tail problems nginx has already solved
There is a problem I believe that API Gateways based on Go can't solve it unless Go have made its GC as good as Java's. Some people have consulted with me about replacing their Go implementation to a Nginx or Envoy one because this problem.
One of my friends brought me up this post in the morning.
The post is awesome and inspirational (caused a discussion in our chant group), though I can't agree with some trivial points.
> Nginx performance without stats collections is on part with Envoy, but our Lua stats collection slowed Nginx on the high-RPS test by a factor of 3. This was expected given our reliance on lua_shared_dict, which is synchronized across workers with a mutex.
The `a factor of 3` is quite large to me. Maybe you put all your stats in lua_shared_dict?
You don't need to synchronize the stats every time. Since the collection regularly happens in per-minute frequency, you can put the stats as Lua table, and synchronize them once per 5/10 seconds.
It look like that the compared Nginx is configured with a system which has been survived for years and not up-to-date. The company I worked with used a single virtual server to hold all traffic and routed them with Lua code dynamically. And the upstream is chosen by Lua code too. There is no need to reload Nginx when a new route/upstream is added. We even implemented 'Access Log Service' like feature so that each user can have her favorite access log (by modifying the Nginx core, of course).
However, I don't think this post is incorrect. What Envoy surpasses Nginx is that it has a more thriving developer community. There are more features added into Envoy than Nginx in the recent years. Not only that, opening discussion of Nginx development is rare.