// the find
TykTechnologies/tyk
Tyk Open Source API Gateway written in Go, supporting REST, GraphQL, TCP and gRPC protocols
Tyk is a production-grade API gateway written in Go, built by a commercial company and open-sourced under MPL 2.0. It handles REST, GraphQL, gRPC, and TCP proxying with auth, rate limiting, transformations, and a plugin system. The target is teams running microservices who want a self-hosted gateway without paying for Kong Enterprise or AWS API Gateway.
The plugin architecture is genuinely flexible — you can write middleware in Go, Python, JavaScript, or anything that speaks gRPC, so you're not locked into Lua like Nginx/Kong. The OAS 3.x import path is well-developed with a dedicated adapter layer and extensive test coverage in apidef/oas/. The Kubernetes operator exists and is maintained separately, so GitOps-style API management via CRDs is a real option, not a demo. Redis-backed rate limiting with hitless config reloads means you can update API definitions without dropping in-flight requests.
The open-source/commercial split is the biggest trap: analytics beyond raw logs, the management dashboard, and the developer portal all live behind the paid tier. You're buying the gateway engine but the operational tooling you actually need day-to-day is paywalled. The 'ee' folder with a commercial license sitting inside the OSS repo is an awkward setup that will confuse contributors. Tests require Redis running locally and the test setup is non-trivial — the ci/ directory is a maze of Dockerfiles, Taskfiles, and shell scripts that assume a lot of internal infrastructure. GraphQL support is real but the dual engine situation (gqlengineadapter v2 vs enginev3 both present) suggests an in-progress migration that could leave you holding deprecated config.