With around 70 million unique users, Xiachufang is the biggest cuisine community in China, making it possible for its users to share home recipes easily, watch video courses made by experts, and shop ingredients or kitchenware.
Xiachufang’s requirements at the beginning of its API gateway research were:
- Being able to efficiently distribute the requests
- A simple and stateless approach to API gateway
- Strong customization capabilities
- An efficient and programmatic way to define rules
- Supporting monitoring and alarms
- Support the traffic and scalability needs of the company
Xiachufang started with a small subset of live services (small as in nearly 2,000 requests per second) before starting moving more services to KrakenD:
As the initial KrakenD live test fulfilled the requirements and passed with good results, the company is starting to move the rest of the services progressively.
As per the customizations, one of the main aspects valued by Xiachufang, KrakenD is now supercharged with the following upgrades:
- A custom monitoring middleware collects additional API request information, such as QPS, latency, anti-spam, etc.
- A custom rate limit middleware aligns with the company’s existing rate limit strategy, including anti-spam, bot detector, and IP filtering.
- Also, Xiachufang developed additional authentication middleware, custom load balancer, and other general features
When asked to developers of Xiachufang why they chose KrakenD, the answer had the following commonalities:
- Performance. KrakenD was fast in all stages.
- Stateless and easiness to deploy
- Easy to extend
Xiachufang required a high-performance but straightforward solution and now runs on KrakenD. In exchange, KrakenD got back a quality contributor to some of its open-source components.
