Emissary-ingress vs Google Cloud Endpoints

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.

Google Cloud Endpoints manages APIs with tools for securing access, monitoring activity, analyzing usage, and setting quotas. It supports API descriptions written in OpenAPI 2.0 or 3.x, as well as gRPC, and provides management through ESP or ESPv2. Documented deployment backends include Google Kubernetes Engine, Compute Engine, Kubernetes, App Engine, Cloud Run, Cloud Run functions, and Knative serving; proxy availability varies by backend. Endpoints is optimized for Docker and can host an API wherever Docker runs, provided it has internet access to Google Cloud. API keys can be required and validated to identify a Google Cloud project for quotas, billing, and monitoring. Documented user authentication options include Firebase Authentication and Auth0, using JWT validation by ESP. Logs and metrics are viewable in the Google Cloud console. Pricing depends on API calls and Service Control calls: the Free usage tier is free for 1,999,999 calls; Standard is $3 a month for 2,000,000 to 1,000,000,000; and High-volume is $1.50 a month for 1,000,000,000 and above. Listed rates are per million API calls.