The Edge Stack API Gateway, built on Envoy Proxy, provides a cloud-native API management experience. It is ideal for businesses seeking high-performance, secure, and scalable microservices architectures. To optimize your organization's budgeting for IT infrastructure, we will guide you through API Gateway pricing and its impact on costs and benefits.
API Gateway Pricing
Most API Gateway pricing is per-call. This means you get charged incrementally for each monthly request for your services. This usage-based model scales as you do but can open you to considerable fluctuations in monthly costs and billing spikes if your service or product becomes popular.
Edge Stack API Gateway sets itself apart with transparent, value-based pricing tiers, ensuring cost clarity and predictability for your business. Edge Stack has two pricing plans tailored to your needs:
Edge Stack has two pricing plans tailored to your needs:
Lite Plan:
- Audience: Perfect for individuals and small teams exploring basic API gateway features.
- Cost: Free
- Features: Enjoy the freedom of unlimited clusters, handle up to 10,000 requests per month, and benefit from essential security features like Web Application Firewall (WAF), rate limiting, and automatic TLS certificates.
Enterprise Plan:
- Audience: Geared towards businesses requiring advanced features and dedicated support.
- Cost: Customized pricing based on your specific needs.
- Features: This plan includes everything in the Lite plan, enhanced request handling capabilities, priority support options, and tailored services for large-scale enterprise environments.
Edge Stack API Gateway Features
Edge Stack API Gateway offers a comprehensive suite of features, even in its free version. Each feature plays a vital role in ensuring that Edge Stack API Gateway is secure, reliable, and adaptable to the varying needs of modern digital enterprises and web applications. Let's delve into these features and understand how they contribute to a robust API management experience:
Dev Portal
The Developer Portal is accessible through Ambassador Cloud, the developer portal is a centralized API documentation and management hub, enhancing developer engagement and facilitating more straightforward access to API resources.
Comprehensive Authentication
Offers robust security for your endpoints using fine-grained access control. It supports authentication protocols like OAuth, JWT, SAML, and OpenID Connect, ensuring only authorized users can access your services.
Rate Limiting
Rate Limiting helps maintain optimal service performance by preventing traffic spikes and potential system overloads. This feature is crucial in ensuring a consistent and reliable user experience, as it manages requests for your services.
Clusters
Involves grouping service instances that can be load-balanced, replicated, and managed cohesively. This feature is vital for high availability and scalability in distributed environments.
Automatic TLS Certificates
Simplifies the process of securing communication by automatically configuring TLS for every host, enhancing data security in transit.
Network Security
With Cert-Manager Integration (TLS, mTLS, & CORS)
Bolsters application and data protection by integrating with cert-manager for certificate management. It enforces both Transport Layer Security (TLS) and Mutual TLS (mTLS), alongside Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS), for encrypted and secure communications.
Single Sign-On (SSO)
SSO enhances user experience by enabling seamless login through a single authentication process across multiple applications, streamlining access and improving security.
Service Mesh Integration
Service Mesh Integration ensures compatibility with leading service mesh solutions, facilitating a unified approach to managing service-to-service communication within Kubernetes environments.
Service Catalog
Service Catalog allows you to view basic details of your services and service groups, aiding in better service management and discovery.
Observability
Incorporates distributed tracing and Layer 7 (L7) metrics. Distributed tracing enables tracking of requests across multiple services, crucial for identifying bottlenecks and performance issues, while L7 metrics provide real-time visibility into traffic, aiding in proactive monitoring and troubleshooting.
OpenAPI Support
Facilitates seamless integration and interoperability with services adhering to OpenAPI standards, promoting consistency and ease of use across your API landscape.
Circuit Breakers, Automatic Retries & Timeouts
Enhances the resilience of services by preventing system overloads through circuit breakers, automatically retrying failed service calls, and setting timeouts to avoid indefinite hanging of requests.
L4/L7 Load Balancing & Routing
Ensures efficient distribution of network traffic across various services and handles routing for a range of protocols, including HTTP, WebSockets, TCP, and gRPC. This feature is essential for maintaining service performance and availability.
Web Application Firewall (WAF)
WAF provides an additional layer of security by proactively identifying and blocking malicious web traffic. This feature is crucial for safeguarding your applications from various web-based threats.
With Edge Stack API Gateway pricing options, you can access powerful tools tailored to meet the demands of various operational scales and budgets. Whether you're a startup exploring the world of API management or a large enterprise seeking robust and scalable solutions, Edge Stack offers a pricing model that aligns with your business needs and growth trajectory.
Enterprise vs. Lite Plan
There are 3 main differences between the Lite and Enterprise plans.
1. Requests Per Month
Requests Per Month are a crucial aspect of the Edge Stack API Gateway pricing structure, catering to different usage scales and business needs.
The Lite plan is tailored for smaller services or early-stage products that experience less than 10,000 requests per month. The Edge Stack API Gateway free tier is an ideal starting point for businesses in their scaling phase or those developing new products. The Lite plan provides a comprehensive API Gateway foundation without overwhelming smaller operations with unnecessary capacity or costs for more messages sent and received. It allows businesses to grow their services organically, ensuring their infrastructure costs align with their current usage and demand.
Despite being designed for lower traffic volumes, the Lite plan still offers a full suite of features necessary for effective API management, making it a robust option for businesses at the beginning of their growth curve.
The Enterprise Plan is suited for larger businesses or services experiencing more than 10,000 requests per month. The pricing for the Enterprise plan is customized based on the specific needs and scale of the business. This approach allows for flexibility and ensures that companies only pay for the required capacity and features.
An essential advantage of the Enterprise plan is the potential for significant cost savings as traffic increases. This plan is designed to scale cost-effectively, offering businesses a reduced cost per request as their traffic grows to millions of REST API calls or millions of HTTP API calls. This aspect is particularly beneficial for rapidly expanding businesses or those with high-traffic applications, as it provides a scalable solution that aligns with the API calls you receive and your evolving requirements.
2. Air-Gapped Clusters
Second is the availability of air-gapped clusters. This functionality enables deployment in fully isolated environments, cut off from external networks, which is critical for maintaining data security and integrity in susceptible environments or subject to strict regulatory standards.
This type of setup is particularly crucial in sectors where data security and integrity are non-negotiable, such as government defense systems, financial institutions, and healthcare organizations handling sensitive information.
The benefits of using air-gapped clusters in such environments include:
Enhanced security.
By physically isolating the network, the risk of external cyber-attacks or unauthorized access is significantly reduced. This setup creates a formidable barrier against malware, ransomware, an
Data integrity
Maintaining data integrity is a security concern and compliance requirement in highly regulated industries. Air-gapped clusters ensure data is not tampered with or altered by external sources, maintaining its accuracy and reliability.
Controlled access
Access to air-gapped systems is typically tightly controlled, with strict data transfer and system maintenance protocols. This level of control further minimizes the risk of internal threats and accidental data exposure.
This is a specific feature that, when considered in the context of Edge Stack API Gateway pricing, reflects a commitment to offering high-security options for diverse organizational needs. Though potentially incurring additional costs, providing air-gapped clusters within an API gateway environment signifies an investment in top-tier security and compliance, ensuring that organizations in sensitive sectors can manage their APIs without compromising on critical security standards.
3. API Gateway Pricing: Priority Support
Edge Stack API Gateway is well-documented with examples, tutorials, and onboarding help, so users on the lite plan can independently navigate through initial setup and troubleshooting. This self-service approach empowers users to learn and solve problems efficiently, making it a practical solution for smaller teams or projects with limited resources. The extensive online community and resources offer additional support for more complex issues or advanced guidance. Start with the lite plan here
Standard support comes with all Enterprise plans and Optional Priority Support Upgrade
Standard support offers 8x5 support, so you can contact support during EST business hours (8 am - 5 pm EST) five days a week. Standard support is ideal for handling routine inquiries, troubleshooting common issues, and answering general usage questions. It's particularly suitable for businesses operating mainly during regular working hours and for problems that do not require immediate, round-the-clock attention.
Standard support typically aims to address and resolve issues within a reasonable timeframe during the designated support hours.
Priority support is a more comprehensive support level available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It's designed to provide immediate assistance for critical issues that may arise outside of regular business hours. Priority support is beneficial for businesses requiring constant uptime or operations spanning multiple time zones.
It ensures that help is always available, regardless of an incident, making it a crucial feature for mission-critical applications.
Priority support is characterized by its rapid response to incidents, ensuring minimal downtime and disruption to business operations. This is particularly important for high-traffic websites or applications where even a short downtime can have significant implications.
Both support options reflect the commitment to providing comprehensive assistance to ensure the smooth operation of the Edge Stack API Gateway. Customers can choose the level of support that best aligns with their operational requirements and the criticality of their applications. The availability of two tiers of support also allows businesses to scale their support needs as they grow or as their requirements change.
Explore Edge Stack: API Gateway Pricing & Features
Explore Edge Stack pricing options to get a comprehensive view of the different editions of Edge Stack API Gateway pricing and understand their pricing structure to find the option that best fits your needs.
Discover Product Features and dive into the extensive features and capabilities of the Edge Stack API Gateway. From advanced rate limiting to comprehensive authentication, learn how each feature can benefit your Kubernetes environment.
Check out the FAQs if you have any further questions. This resource covers many common queries, providing clarity and additional insights into the Edge Stack API Gateway.