As far as I know, Instance Management and the Controller have the same functions, which managing NGINX Plus and the Instances. but it does not make more sense.
So my question is
What are the differences between Instance Management and Controller?
What is Ingress Controller?
Nginx Instance Management: NGINX Instance Manager empowers you to
Automate configuration and monitoring using APIs.
For example, if you have multiple servers using Nginx then in Nginx Plus service provides a dashboard where all the events can be monitored, Including spikes on specific events, Or think as one of the servers has not been updated from having multiple VM, monitor the list of inventory. To achieve nginx-agant needs to install along with Nginx server on the host.
Ensure your fleet of NGINX web servers and proxies have fixes for
active CVEs
Seamlessly integrate with third‑party monitoring solutions such as
Prometheus and Grafana for insights
Nginx Controller: NGINX Controller is cloud‑agnostic and includes a set of enterprise‑grade services that give you a clear line of sight to apps in development, test, or production. With per‑app analytics, you gain new insights into app performance and reliability so you can pinpoint performance issues before they impact production.
Example: To enable the ingress you did need an Ingress Controller to enabled first.
Nginx Ingress: Each LoadBalancer service requires its own load balancer with its own public IP address, whereas an Ingress only requires one, even when providing access to dozens of services. When a client sends an HTTP request to the Ingress, the host and path in the request determine which service the request is forwarded to.
For example Google Kubernetes Controller
I currently have services running on the Google App Engine platform which use the X-Appengine-Inbound-Appid header to limit HTTP requests to our apps only.
I recently found out that some of my services require a static IP and therefor I would like to move some of the services to the Kubernetes Engine.
Is there a way for Kubernetes Engine to secure requests using a similar header approach? The requests should only be allowed from our own Firebase apps.
Ideally I would keep things as simple as possible for the clients using the services.
Possibly I could generate a specific API key for each user which can be blacklisted on abuse, but that already adds quite a bit of complexity.
You can use ngnix ingress controller as an entry point for your cluster, and add whatever rules for ngnix.
I have a public API running on EC2 instance (through AWS ELB) built with Symfony3. However, I have several background tasks which have to consume this API but only on dedicated endpoints. I have to ensure that it is only the workers that consume these endpoints.
I was wondering how can I implement such a structure with AWS. I'm looking at API gateway, VPCs, but I'm kind of lost.
Do you have an idea?
If both the API server and the API consumers are running on EC2 instances, then you can easily configure the security group assigned to your API server to restrict access to only those API consumer instances. Just create a rule in the security group that opens the inbound port for your API, and use the security group(s) assigned to your API consumer instances as the source.
In order to deal with the microservice architecture, it's often used alongside a Reverse Proxy (such as nginx or apache httpd) and for cross cutting concerns implementation API gateway pattern is used. Sometimes Reverse proxy does the work of API gateway.
It will be good to see clear differences between these two approaches.
It looks like the potential benefit of API gateway usage is invoking multiple microservices and aggregating the results. All other responsibilities of API gateway can be implemented using Reverse Proxy. Such as:
Authentication (It can be done using nginx LUA scripts);
Transport security. It itself Reverse Proxy task;
Load balancing
...
So based on this there are several questions:
Does it make sense to use API gateway and Reverse proxy simultaneously (as example request -> API gateway -> reverse proxy(nginx) -> concrete microservice)? In what cases ?
What are the other differences that can be implemented using API gateway and can't be implemented by Reverse proxy and vice versa?
It is easier to think about them if you realize they aren't mutually exclusive. Think of an API gateway as a specific type reverse proxy implementation.
In regards to your questions, it is not uncommon to see both used in conjunction where the API gateway is treated as an application tier that sits behind a reverse proxy for load balancing and health checking. An example would be something like a WAF sandwich architecture in that your Web Application Firewall/API Gateway is sandwiched by reverse proxy tiers, one for the WAF itself and the other for the individual microservices it talks to.
Regarding the differences, they are very similar. It's just nomenclature. As you take a basic reverse proxy setup and start bolting on more pieces like authentication, rate limiting, dynamic config updates, and service discovery, people are more likely to call that an API gateway.
I believe, API Gateway is a reverse proxy that can be configured dynamically via API and potentially via UI, while traditional reverse proxy (like Nginx, HAProxy or Apache) is configured via config file and has to be restarted when configuration changes. Thus, API Gateway should be used when routing rules or other configuration often changes. To your questions:
It makes sense as long as every component in this sequence serves its purpose.
Differences are not in feature list but in the way configuration changes applied.
Additionally, API Gateway is often provided in form of SAAS, like Apigee or Tyk for example.
Also, here's my tutorial on how to create a simple API Gateway with Node.js https://memz.co/api-gateway-microservices-docker-node-js/
Hope it helps.
API gateway acts as a reverse proxy to accept all application programming interface (API) calls, aggregate the various services required to fulfill them, and return the appropriate result.
An API gateway has a more robust set of features — especially around security and monitoring — than an API proxy. I would say API gateway pattern also called as Backend for frontend (BFF) is widely used in Microservices development. Checkout the article for the benefits and features of API Gateway pattern in Microservice world.
On the other hand API proxy is basically a lightweight API gateway. It includes some basic security and monitoring capabilities. So, if you already have an API and your needs are simple, an API proxy will work fine.
The below image will provide you the clear picture of the difference between API Gateway and Reverse proxy.
API Gateways usually operate as a L7 construct.
API Gateways provide additional functionality as compared to a plain reverse proxy. If you consider some of the portals out there they can provide :
full API Lifecycle Management including documentation
a portal which can be used as the source of truth for various client applications and where you can provide client governance, rate limiting etc.
routing to different versions of the API including canary/beta versions
detecting usage patterns, register apps, retrieve client credentials etc.
However with the advent of service meshes like Istio, Consul a lot of the functionality of API Gateways will be subsumed by meshes.
From HTTP: The Definitive Guide:
Strictly speaking, proxies connect two or more applications that speak
the same protocol, while gateways hook up two or more parties that
speak different protocols. A gateway acts as a "protocol converter,"
allowing a client to complete a transaction with a server, even when
the client and server speak different protocols.
In practice, the difference between proxies and gateways is blurry.
Because browsers and servers implement different versions of HTTP,
proxies often do some amount of protocol conversion. And commercial
proxy servers implement gateway functionality to support SSL security
protocols, SOCKS firewalls, FTP access, and web-based applications.
Reverse proxy, such as Nginx and Apache, do not deal with observability, authentication, authorization, service orchestration, etc., but only do load balancing and forward traffic to upstream.
API Gateway is close to the user's business scenario and helps users solve the security and observability issues of various APIs and microservices.
Different positioning leads to different technical aspects of reverse proxy and API gateway. API gateways, such as Apache APISIX, have nearly 100 plugins and support multiple programming languages for plugin development.
If you already have a good API gateway, there is no need to use a reverse proxy.
Regarding the Andrey Chausenko's answer that
I believe, API Gateway is a reverse proxy that can be configured dynamically via API and potentially via UI, while traditional reverse proxy (like Nginx, HAProxy or Apache) is configured via config file and has to be restarted when configuration changes.
I think it is not true nowadays as modern reverse proxy like Envoy can be dynamically configured by control plane via xDS.
I want deploy backend WCF service in WebRole in Cloud Service 1 only with Internal Endpoint.
And deploy ASP.NET MVC frontend in WebRole in Cloud Service 2.
Is it possible to use Azure Virtual Netowork to call backend from frontend by Internal Endpoint ?
UPDATED: I am just trying build simple SOA architect like this:
Yes and No.
An internal endpoint essentially means that the role instance has been configured to accept traffic on a given port, but that port can NOT receive traffic from outside of the cloud service (hence it being "internal" to the cloud service). Internal endpoints are also not load balanced so you're going to need to "juggle" traffic management from the callers yourself.
Now here is where the issues arise, a virtual network allows you to securely traverse cloud service boundaries, letting a role instance in cloud service 1 call a role instance in cloud service 2. However, to do this, the calling role instance needs to know how to address the receiving instance. If they were in the same cloud service, they you can crawl the cloud service topology via the RoleEnvironment class. But this class only works for the cloud service its exists in, its not aware of a virtual network.
Now you could have the receiving role instance publish its FQDN to a shared area (say Azure table storage). However, a cloud service will only use its own internal DNS resolution (which only allows you to resolve short names in the same cloud service) unless you have configured the virtual network with a self-hosted DNS server.
So yes, you can do what you're trying to accomplish, but it does present some challenges. Given this, I'd have to argue if the convenience of separating for deployment enough to justify the additional complexity of the solution? If so, then I'd also look and see if perhaps there's a better way to interconnect the two services rather then direct calls (like a queue based pattern).
#BrentDaCodeMonkey makes some very valid points in his answer, so read that first.
I, personally, would not want to give up automatic discovery and scale via load balancing. My suggestion would be that you expose the WCF endpoint via an Azure Service Bus Relay endpoint. This will give you a "fixed" endpoint with which to communicate (solving the discovery issue) and infinite scalability because multiple servers can register and listen on the same Service Bus relay address. Additionally it introduces some basic security into the mix via shared key authentication when your web application(s) connect to your WCF services.
If you co-locate the Service Bus instance with your Cloud Services the overhead of the relay in the middle is totally negligible and, IMHO, worth it for the benefits explained above.