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krakend/krakend-ce
KrakenD Community Edition: High-performance, stateless, declarative, API Gateway written in Go.
KrakenD CE is a declarative, stateless API gateway written in Go that handles aggregation, transformation, and routing of backend service calls. It's aimed at teams running microservices who want to avoid the coordination overhead of distributed state in their gateway layer. The CE split from the enterprise offering means you get the core engine for free, with advanced features (RBAC, async agents, some plugins) behind a paid wall.
Stateless-by-design is the real differentiator — no etcd, no Consul coordination required, just deploy N identical nodes behind a load balancer and you're done. The JSON config is fully declarative and GitOps-friendly, which makes config review and rollback as simple as a diff. The performance numbers are credible for Go gateways of this type: low memory footprint (~50MB at 1000 concurrent) is a genuine operational win vs. Kong or APISIX. The extension model (Go plugins, CEL, Lua, Martian DSL) gives you four different escape hatches depending on how much you want to couple to the gateway.
The CE/Enterprise split is opaque — you'll only discover which features are paywalled when you need them, and the docs don't always make this obvious upfront. The config format is verbose JSON; large gateway configurations with dozens of endpoints become unwieldy fast and there's no native templating, so teams end up reaching for external tools (Helm, Jsonnet) to manage it. Dynamic config changes require a restart — there's no hot-reload, which is a real ops pain point if you're iterating on routes frequently. The krakend-ce repo itself is a thin assembly layer gluing together private library modules, so debugging anything below the surface means tracing into opaque dependencies you can't easily inspect or contribute to.