KrakenD
Ultra-fast stateless API gateway in Go with declarative JSON configuration.
About
KrakenD is a high-performance, stateless API gateway written in Go. Unlike full APIM suites it deliberately stays a gateway and aggregation layer: configuration is a declarative JSON file, nodes share no state, and you add capabilities (auth, rate limiting, transformations, telemetry) through plugins. It is a single binary with no mandatory database, aimed at teams that want microservice front doors without operating a control plane.
Created in 2016 by Albert Lombarte, Daniel Lopez, and Daniel Ortiz, the KrakenD company was incorporated in Barcelona in 2021; that same year the open-source framework was donated to the Linux Foundation as the Lura Project. The company reports users including IBM, National Geographic, Oracle, and US Navy units, and claims about 2M servers run KrakenD monthly (provider-reported). In 2025 the company was integrated into the Shop Circle platform while remaining operationally independent. The community edition (krakend-ce, Apache 2.0) is free and unlimited; KrakenD Enterprise adds a UI, audit tooling, and support at roughly $990 per month per cluster.
What it can do
- Stateless declarative gateway with JSON config
- Response aggregation across microservices
- Rate limiting, throttling, and circuit breaking
- JWT/OAuth2 and API-key security policies
- Plugin system in Go, Lua, and CEL
- OpenTelemetry and Prometheus telemetry
Setup
docker run -p 8080:8080 krakend/krakend-ce with a krakend.json config, or download the single binary for your OS.
Prerequisites
A krakend.json config file; backends to route to.
Use cases
Works with
Trust score — 8/10
Scored 8/10 (verified tier, metrics-v1). Evidence: history and Lura donation documented on Wikipedia; star count and Apache 2.0 license read directly from GitHub; enterprise pricing from independent catalogs. Strengths: genuinely stateless and dependency-free, Linux Foundation lineage, real production adopters. Docked for: (1) no management UI, developer portal, or lifecycle tooling in the community edition; (2) adoption claims (2M servers/month) are provider-reported; (3) 2025 Shop Circle integration adds mild corporate-direction uncertainty. License: Apache-2.0 (community edition).
★ 2,691 GitHub stars
How the trust score is built
Full methodology →- Adoption · stars/downloads, log-scaled vs peers
- 7.0/10
- Maintenance · recency, releases, issue load
- 8.0/10
- Openness · license + docs
- 10.0/10
- Manual review · sanity read + red-flag check
- 8.0/10
- · Created 2016 by Lombarte/Lopez/Ortiz; company incorporated Barcelona 2021
- · OSS framework donated to Linux Foundation as Lura Project (2021)
- · 2,691 GitHub stars on krakend/krakend-ce (verified via GitHub API)
- · 2025 integration into Shop Circle platform while operationally independent (Wikipedia); provider-claimed 2M servers/month and adopters (IBM, NatGeo, Oracle, US Navy)
- · manual review: no UI/portal in CE; Shop Circle move adds mild uncertainty
Sources
Every fact above was checked against these sources. Where a claim comes from the provider and couldn't be independently verified, the text says so.