Introduction

What is Blackgate?

Blackgate is an API gateway application. It routes traffic to upstream and then proxy response to downstream.

You can extend the ability of Blackgate by write plugin for it. There are some builtin plugins in Blackgate. You can find them in blackgate.contrib.

What is not Blackgate?

Blackgate is not a service discovery service. This is mainly because there are some mature open-source implements already: consul, etcd, zookeeper, etc.

Blackgate is not a load balancer, which means that you have to choose your load balancer for your upstream services. Nginx and HAProxy are two excellent server-side load blancing solutions.

Alternative Solutions

Kong is similar to Blackgate. In most case they share the same concepts. If your team are familiar with Nginx+Lua, this is probably a better choice. The reason not using Kong is because if you want to start a Kong cluster, you have to run a bunch of dependencies in several nodes, like Nginx, PostgreSQL, etc. Blackgate is much simpler in this case. Write config, and Run instance. Nothing more. In early stage, we can choose a simpler tool like Blackgate to avoid over-engineering.

You might also want to monitor and register services to your service discovery service. Although it’s complicated , it still turns out to be a mature solution.