News

KrakenD API Gateway for Microservices Becomes Linux Foundation 'Lura' Project

• By John K. Waters
• May 13, 2021

The team behind the KrakenD stateless, distributed, high-performance API gateway that enables microservices adoption, announced this week that the Linux Foundation will host the continued development of the gateway under a new name: the Lura Project.

KrakenD was created five years ago as a library for engineers to create fast and reliable API gateways. It has been in production among a range of Internet companies since 2016.

The newly rechristened Lura is an open-source framework for building API gateways that "go beyond simple reverse proxies" to function as aggregators for microservices and serve as declarative tools for creating endpoints.

"The Lura Project’s mission is to offer an extendable, simple, and stateless high-performance API Gateway framework designed for cloud-native and on-prem setups," said KrakenD CEO Albert Lombarte, in a blog post. "Rather than solving a specific use case, Lura provides a library of components, a framework for assembling them into custom API gateway systems like a Lego set."

The Lura implementations of the KrakenD API gateway will continue to be available with no changes needed for its Community (FOSS) and Enterprise editions, and no action is required of current users, Lombarte said. The company plans to incorporate Lura as the new engine on KrakenD 2.0, which he said is coming soon.

The list of Lura Project partners includes 99P Labs (backed by Ohio State University), Ardan Studios, Hepsiburada, Openroom, Postman, Skalena, and Stayforlong.

The Linux Foundation is a non-profit technology consortium that hosts and promotes the collaborative development of a wide range of open-source projects. Founded in 2000, the foundation was created by the merger of Open Source Development Labs and the Free Standards Group with the goal of standardizing Linux, supporting its growth, and promoting its commercial adoption. The foundation currently comprises more than 1,000 members and is one of the world's leading hosting organizations for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware.

"The Lura Project is an essential [connective] tissue for applications and services across open source cloud projects, and so it's a natural decision to host it at the Linux Foundation," said Mike Dolan, the foundation's senior vice president and general manager of projects, in a statement. "We're looking forward to providing the open governance structure to support Lura Project's massive growth."