Amazon API Gateway vs Emissary-ingress

Amazon API Gateway is a cloud service for creating, publishing, maintaining, monitoring, and securing APIs that connect applications to backend services. It supports REST, HTTP, and WebSocket APIs, including real-time two-way communication. Integrations include AWS Lambda, Step Functions, Elastic Beanstalk, EC2, and public HTTP endpoints; HTTP APIs can also route requests to certain private services. API Gateway Portals provide managed spaces to discover, document, and govern REST APIs. Traffic controls include request throttling and configurable caching for REST APIs. The console integrates with Amazon CloudWatch for call, latency, and error metrics, alarms, and execution logs. Authorization options include IAM, Lambda authorizers, OIDC, OAuth 2.0, and other listed methods; REST API keys are optional. A free tier is available to new AWS customers for up to 12 months within monthly allowances, with excess usage charged at standard rates. Pay-as-you-go has no minimum fees or upfront commitments; the listed pricing note is From $1. WebSocket messages can be up to 128 KB and are metered in 32 KB increments.

Emissary-ingress is a free, open-source Kubernetes API gateway, Layer 7 load balancer, and Ingress built on Envoy Proxy. It handles HTTP, HTTPS, HTTP proxy, HTTPS proxy, TCP, TLS, gRPC, and HTTP/3 traffic. Developers can add, remove, merge, or separate services through Kubernetes resources or annotations, and use annotations to control traffic shares for canary deployments. Emissary stores state in Kubernetes rather than requiring a separate database, with Envoy handling routing and proxying. It can check requests through an external authentication service and a third-party rate limit service, and supports request transformation and client certificate validation, including mutual TLS. A diagnostics service helps investigate configuration issues. Emissary can act as an Istio edge proxy and supports Consul service discovery. It is self-hosted on Linux; Helm is the recommended installation method, with Kubernetes YAML also documented. The project is intended for cloud-native organizations where developers operate their services, as well as developers and operators.