How Project Lura is Improving APIs

APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) provide exponential growth opportunities for what the web and its data and applications can do for us. Since APIs allow for sharing of data between applications, doors open to what is possible as the strengths of disparate systems are combined into a new one.

While we live in an API-driven world, it can be difficult and burdensome to connect and maintain systems via an API. Reducing those barriers opens even more doors and lets people like me, who have more ideas than skills, try things out. Enter API gateways to help ease the burden.

But not all API gateways are created equal. The Lura Project, formerly the KrakenD open source project, is a framework for building API gateways that goes beyond simple reverse proxy, functioning as a stateless, distributed, high-performance aggregator for many microservices. It is also a declarative tool (tell it what you need rather than how to do it) for creating endpoints. Albert Lombarte, the executive director of The Lura Project and the CEO of KrakenD, elaborates, “An API gateway framework is a tool that is between the clients, the consumers of an API, and the backend services, which actually have the data that the users want to consume. So an API gateway is a product that makes possible things like security, where rate-limiting, authorization, load balancing, all of that happens without needing to implement that in the backend part.”

KrakenD was created six years ago as a library for engineers to create fast and reliable API gateways and has since been in production among some of the world’s largest Internet businesses. In order to keep up with the demand from the community, in 2021 KrakenD decided to host the project at The Linux Foundation. Lombarte said, “By being hosted at the Linux Foundation, the Lura Project will extend the legacy of the KrakenD open source framework and be better poised to support its massive adoption among more than one million servers every month. The Foundation’s open governance model will accelerate development and community support for this amazing success.”

To learn more about the project, watch Albert’s interview with Swapnil Bhartiya of TFiR and go to the project’s website. Then, join the community. You can help create better tools so we can utilize APIs for even more than we can imagine today.