I used Kong in a project recently. Very bare-bones, You need to build your own client for it. Overall, it felt like a blackbox where things magically happened. Totally hated it.
Hello, CTO of Kong here. You mean a client to consume the Admin API in order to create entities on Kong? If that's the case the community has built lots of open source clients in pretty much any language that would make the job of integrating Kong within an existing system much easier. The community around Kong has also built declarative configuration support that you can use instead of the Admin API.
Our official declarative configuration will also be released very soon, and in some environments (like Kubernetes) we already support it.
Excited to hear about an official declarative config. When we were looking at deploying Kong, this was our biggest pain point (looked at lots of 3rd party solutions but none were ideal).
It is a community product first and foremost with a plugin framework that allows for extensibility with access to the full core API.
You can discuss with the community online [1], or meet a core contributor at one of the community meetups or in the monthly community call that we usually announce on Discuss.
They are different products. Nginx and haproxy are more comparable. If you like HAproxy as a load balancer, you can easily use it with Kong. A lot of people do just that.
