Choosing Golang, Kong, or Urfav: Which is Best for You?

Choosing Golang, Kong, or Urfav: Which is Best for You?

The digital landscape is increasingly defined by its interconnectedness, a vast web of services communicating through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). At the heart of this intricate ecosystem lies a crucial component: the API gateway. This single point of entry for all incoming API calls acts as a traffic cop, a bouncer, and a translator, ensuring that your services are secure, performant, and manageable. The decision of which API gateway to implement – whether building a custom solution with a powerful language like Golang, leveraging a robust off-the-shelf product like Kong, or opting for a custom framework-based solution (which we'll refer to as "Urfav" for "Your Custom Framework/Solution") – is a strategic one with far-reaching implications for an organization's architecture, operational efficiency, and long-term scalability.

This comprehensive guide will delve deep into the nuances of each approach, meticulously dissecting their advantages, disadvantages, and ideal use cases. We aim to equip architects, developers, and decision-makers with the insights necessary to navigate this complex choice, ensuring they select the gateway that not only meets current demands but also propels their future innovations. We will explore the technical underpinnings, the operational considerations, and the strategic value proposition of each option, culminating in a robust framework for making an informed decision in an ever-evolving API economy.

The Indispensable Role of the API Gateway

Before we embark on a comparative analysis, it's paramount to fully grasp the multifaceted role of an API gateway. In an era dominated by microservices architectures, cloud-native deployments, and an insatiable demand for interconnected services, the API gateway has evolved from a simple reverse proxy into a sophisticated management layer. It is the frontline defender, the traffic orchestrator, and the policy enforcer for your backend services. Without a well-chosen and properly configured gateway, managing a complex array of APIs can quickly devolve into chaos, compromising security, performance, and overall system stability.

At its core, an API gateway serves as a centralized hub, abstracting the complexity of backend services from external consumers. Instead of interacting directly with numerous disparate microservices, clients communicate solely with the gateway, which then intelligently routes requests to the appropriate backend. This abstraction provides a critical layer of insulation, allowing developers to refactor or redeploy services without impacting client applications, thereby significantly improving agility.

Beyond simple routing, the functionalities encompassed by a modern API gateway are extensive and critical for robust API management. These include:

• Authentication and Authorization: Verifying the identity of API consumers and ensuring they have the necessary permissions to access requested resources. This often involves integrating with identity providers, handling OAuth tokens, JWTs, API keys, and more.
• Rate Limiting and Throttling: Protecting backend services from overload by controlling the number of requests a client can make within a given timeframe, preventing denial-of-service attacks and ensuring fair resource allocation.
• Load Balancing: Distributing incoming API traffic across multiple instances of a backend service to optimize resource utilization, enhance responsiveness, and ensure high availability.
• Caching: Storing responses from backend services to serve subsequent identical requests faster, reducing the load on upstream services and decreasing latency for API consumers.
• Request/Response Transformation: Modifying requests before they reach backend services and responses before they are sent back to clients. This can involve format conversions (e.g., XML to JSON), header manipulation, or content rewriting.
• Security Policies: Implementing Web Application Firewall (WAF) functionalities, IP whitelisting/blacklisting, bot detection, and other measures to guard against common web vulnerabilities and malicious activities.
• Monitoring and Logging: Collecting metrics on API usage, performance, and errors, and logging all API interactions for auditing, troubleshooting, and analytical purposes. This provides invaluable insights into the health and utilization of your API ecosystem.
• Versioning: Managing different versions of an API, allowing for backward compatibility while new features are introduced, ensuring a smooth transition for consumers.
• Circuit Breaking: Automatically detecting and preventing calls to failing services to prevent cascading failures in a microservices architecture, enhancing resilience.

In essence, the API gateway is not just a piece of infrastructure; it is a strategic control point that dictates how easily, securely, and efficiently your organization exposes its digital capabilities. The choice of gateway is therefore a foundational architectural decision that impacts everything from developer experience to operational costs and ultimately, the agility of the business.

Golang as a Foundation for a Custom API Gateway

When the specific needs of an organization diverge significantly from what off-the-shelf solutions offer, or when extreme performance and resource efficiency are paramount, building a custom API gateway using a powerful, low-level language like Golang emerges as a compelling option. Golang, often simply referred to as Go, has rapidly gained traction in the realm of high-performance network services due to its intrinsic design philosophies and robust feature set. It offers a unique blend of C-like performance with Python-like development simplicity, making it an attractive candidate for foundational infrastructure components.

Why Golang for a Gateway?

Go's appeal for building an API gateway stems from several key characteristics:

• Exceptional Performance: Go compiles to native machine code, eliminating the overhead associated with virtual machines or interpreters. This results in incredibly fast execution speeds, crucial for a component that sits in the critical path of every API call. Its efficient garbage collector is also designed to minimize pause times, further contributing to predictable low latency.
• Superior Concurrency Model: Go's standout feature is its elegant and powerful concurrency model, built around goroutines and channels. Goroutines are lightweight, independently executing functions that can run concurrently, allowing a Go gateway to handle tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of concurrent connections with minimal resource consumption. Channels provide a safe and efficient way for goroutines to communicate, preventing common concurrency pitfalls like race conditions. This makes Go ideally suited for I/O-bound tasks like proxying network requests.
• Memory Efficiency: Go's runtime footprint is remarkably small, and its memory management is highly optimized. This translates to lower infrastructure costs and the ability to run more services per server, a significant advantage for high-traffic gateway deployments where every byte of RAM and every CPU cycle counts.
• Simplicity and Readability: Despite its power, Go is designed for simplicity. Its clean syntax, strong typing, and opinionated approach to formatting make Go code easy to read, write, and maintain, even for large, complex projects. This reduces the learning curve for new team members and minimizes the likelihood of subtle bugs.
• Fast Compilation and Static Binaries: Go's compiler is incredibly fast, allowing for quick iteration cycles. Furthermore, it produces statically linked binaries, meaning the executable includes all its dependencies. This simplifies deployment, as you can often just copy a single file to a server, reducing dependency hell and streamlining CI/CD pipelines.

Advantages of a Golang Custom Gateway

Choosing to build your gateway with Golang unlocks a distinct set of advantages:

• Ultimate Control and Flexibility: This is arguably the biggest draw. A custom Go gateway provides complete control over every aspect of its functionality. You can implement highly specialized routing algorithms, integrate with unique authentication systems, optimize for particular network protocols, or embed custom business logic directly into the gateway without being constrained by the design choices or plugin limitations of an off-the-shelf product. This is invaluable for niche industries or highly regulated environments with specific compliance requirements.
• Optimized for Specific Use Cases: Unlike general-purpose gateways, a Go-based custom solution can be meticulously tailored to perform exceptionally well for your exact workload. If your APIs have specific performance profiles, payload structures, or interaction patterns, a custom gateway can be finely tuned to maximize throughput and minimize latency for those precise scenarios, often outperforming generic solutions that aim to cater to a broader audience.
• Lean Resource Consumption: Due to Go's inherent efficiency, a well-engineered custom gateway written in Go can often achieve higher performance with fewer computational resources compared to solutions built on less efficient languages or more resource-intensive frameworks. This translates directly into lower infrastructure costs, a critical consideration for organizations operating at scale.
• Deep Integration Capabilities: If your existing infrastructure heavily leverages other Go services or libraries, a Go gateway can integrate seamlessly, sharing data structures, common libraries, and operational tooling. This consistency across your technology stack can simplify development, debugging, and deployment workflows.

It is worth noting that while Golang offers immense power and flexibility for building custom solutions, the journey requires a significant commitment. For organizations grappling with the complexity of custom API gateway development, especially when integrating a diverse array of AI models, a specialized platform like ApiPark offers a compelling alternative. APIPark is an open-source AI gateway and API management platform that provides many of the high-performance features you'd expect from a custom Go build, but with the added benefits of quick integration for over 100 AI models, unified API formats, and comprehensive API lifecycle management, all out-of-the-box. This can dramatically reduce the development burden and accelerate time to market compared to building every feature from scratch.

Disadvantages of a Golang Custom Gateway

Despite its numerous strengths, the custom Golang gateway approach comes with significant drawbacks that warrant careful consideration:

• Significant Development Effort and Time: Building an enterprise-grade API gateway from scratch is an monumental undertaking. It requires designing and implementing every core feature – routing, authentication, authorization, rate limiting, caching, monitoring, logging, security, and more. This is not a weekend project; it demands substantial engineering resources and a considerable time investment, potentially delaying time to market for your actual business services.
• Requires Deep Expertise: To build a high-performance, secure, and resilient gateway, your team needs deep expertise in not only Golang but also network programming, distributed systems, security protocols, and operational best practices. The nuances of handling edge cases, ensuring fault tolerance, and optimizing for various traffic patterns are complex and require seasoned engineers.
• Higher Initial Cost and Ongoing Maintenance Burden: The initial development cost for a custom gateway is high due to the extensive engineering hours required. Moreover, unlike off-the-shelf products that receive updates and bug fixes from their vendors/communities, your team will be solely responsible for all ongoing maintenance, security patches, feature enhancements, and bug resolution. This can become a significant long-term operational burden.
• Reinventing the Wheel for Common Features: A large portion of an API gateway's functionality is common across most use cases. By building custom, you are effectively reinventing well-understood and battle-tested solutions for authentication, rate limiting, and other standard features, which increases development time and the risk of introducing bugs or security vulnerabilities.
• Lack of a Pre-built Ecosystem (for specific gateway features): While Go has a rich ecosystem of general-purpose libraries, the specific ecosystem for API gateway functionalities (e.g., a declarative configuration language, a plugin architecture for extensions, a comprehensive GUI for management) would need to be built by your team.

When to Choose Golang for Your Gateway

Despite the substantial commitment, a custom Golang gateway is the right choice in specific scenarios:

• Extreme Performance and Low Latency Needs: Industries like high-frequency trading, real-time analytics, or gaming where every microsecond matters will benefit immensely from Go's raw speed and efficiency.
• Highly Specialized Protocols or Requirements: If your APIs use non-standard protocols, require unique security mechanisms, or demand bespoke transformations that no existing gateway can handle without extensive and cumbersome customization, Golang offers the freedom to implement precisely what's needed.
• Deep Integration with Existing Go Ecosystem: Organizations already heavily invested in Go for their microservices might find a Go gateway aligns perfectly with their existing tooling, skill sets, and architectural patterns.
• Control over the Entire Stack: For organizations that want absolute control over their infrastructure, with the resources and expertise to manage it, a custom Go gateway offers unparalleled autonomy.

In essence, choosing Golang for your API gateway is a decision to build a highly optimized, bespoke solution. It's a path for the technically mature organization with unique, demanding requirements and the willingness to invest significant resources in engineering and maintenance, seeking to gain a competitive edge through unparalleled control and performance.

Kong – The Feature-Rich, Battle-Tested API Gateway

Moving from the highly customizable, build-it-yourself philosophy of Golang, we encounter Kong, a prime example of a robust, open-source API gateway that has become a cornerstone for modern microservices architectures. Kong positions itself as a universal API management layer, sitting in front of your microservices or legacy APIs, and designed to manage, secure, and extend their capabilities. Built on Nginx and OpenResty, Kong leverages the highly performant asynchronous processing capabilities of Nginx, augmented by the power of Lua scripting through OpenResty, to deliver a feature-rich and scalable solution.

What is Kong?

Kong is an open-source, cloud-native API gateway and microservice management layer, released under the Apache 2.0 license. It functions as a reverse proxy, routing client requests to upstream services, while also enforcing policies and providing a plethora of functionalities. Its core architecture comprises:

• Kong Gateway: The runtime engine that handles all inbound and outbound API traffic.
• Data Store: Traditionally PostgreSQL or Cassandra, used to store configuration data for Kong (e.g., services, routes, consumers, plugins).
• Kong Manager/Admin API: A web-based graphical user interface (GUI) and a RESTful API for configuring and managing Kong programmatically.

Kong's popularity stems from its balance of performance, extensibility, and comprehensive feature set, making it suitable for a wide array of use cases, from small startups to large enterprises.

Key Features of Kong

Kong's strength lies in its extensive list of out-of-the-box features and its highly extensible plugin architecture:

• Plugin Ecosystem: This is Kong's most defining feature. It comes with a vast library of pre-built plugins that cover virtually every API gateway function imaginable:
  • Authentication & Authorization: API Key, Basic Auth, JWT, OAuth 2.0 introspection, OpenID Connect, LDAP, mTLS, etc.
  • Traffic Control: Rate Limiting, Request Size Limiting, Proxy Cache, Circuit Breakers, Correlation ID.
  • Security: ACL (Access Control List), IP Restriction, Bot Detection, CORS, WAF integration.
  • Transformations: Request/Response Transformer, Header Transformer.
  • Observability: Prometheus, Datadog, Zipkin, StatsD, Loggly, Syslog, File Log.
  • Serverless: AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, Google Cloud Functions. These plugins can be applied globally, to specific services, or even to individual routes, providing granular control over API traffic.
• Declarative Configuration: Kong's configuration is declarative, meaning you define the desired state of your gateway (e.g., which services exist, how routes map to them, which plugins are enabled) in a configuration file or via the Admin API. Kong then ensures the runtime matches this desired state. This approach is highly compatible with GitOps and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) practices.
• Kubernetes-Native: Kong offers strong integration with Kubernetes through its Ingress Controller and native Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs). This allows developers to manage Kong configurations directly through Kubernetes manifests, treating API gateway policies as first-class Kubernetes resources.
• Performance: Built on Nginx, Kong inherits Nginx's reputation for high performance and low latency, capable of handling thousands of requests per second. Its event-driven architecture makes it very efficient for I/O-bound tasks.
• Developer Portal (Enterprise): While the core gateway is open source, Kong offers an enterprise version that includes a sophisticated developer portal, enabling businesses to document, publish, and manage APIs for internal and external developers, streamlining discovery and consumption.

Advantages of Kong

Opting for Kong as your API gateway brings several compelling advantages:

• Rich Feature Set Out-of-the-Box: For most common API gateway requirements, Kong provides a ready-made solution. Its extensive plugin library means you rarely need to "reinvent the wheel" for features like authentication, rate limiting, or logging. This significantly reduces development time and effort compared to building custom solutions.
• Extensible via Plugins: While it offers many features, Kong remains highly extensible. If a specific requirement isn't met by an existing plugin, you can develop your own custom plugins using Lua (or even Go and JavaScript with newer versions/enterprise offerings) to tailor its functionality. This provides a good balance between out-of-the-box utility and customization.
• Robust Community and Commercial Support: Being a widely adopted open-source project, Kong benefits from a large, active community providing support, sharing knowledge, and contributing to its development. Additionally, Kong Inc. (the company behind Kong) offers professional commercial support, enterprise features, and consulting services, providing peace of mind for mission-critical deployments.
• Faster Time to Market: By leveraging Kong's pre-built functionalities, organizations can expose their APIs to the world much faster. This accelerated time to market is a critical competitive advantage, allowing businesses to iterate rapidly and deliver value quickly.
• Reduced Operational Overhead (Compared to Custom Builds): While Kong requires operational expertise, it significantly reduces the burden compared to a custom-built gateway. The core gateway is maintained by Kong Inc. and its community, which means less effort spent on security patches, performance optimizations, and bug fixes for foundational features.
• Scalability and Resilience: Kong is designed for high availability and horizontal scalability. You can deploy multiple Kong nodes in a cluster, leveraging its underlying data store for synchronized configuration, to handle massive traffic loads and ensure continuous service.

Disadvantages of Kong

Despite its strengths, Kong is not without its limitations:

• Less Flexibility for Highly Specialized Requirements: While extensible, Kong's architecture might not be suitable for extremely niche or non-standard protocols that fall outside the typical HTTP/HTTPS API landscape. Custom plugins might bridge some gaps, but they add complexity and maintenance overhead.
• Learning Curve for Configuration and Ecosystem: Kong has its own declarative configuration model and a distinct plugin ecosystem. Teams new to Kong will need to invest time in understanding its concepts, best practices, and the intricacies of configuring plugins effectively.
• Potential Vendor Lock-in (with Enterprise Features): While the core Kong Gateway is open source, many advanced features, particularly those geared towards enterprise use cases (like the Developer Portal, Vitals, or specific security plugins), are part of the commercial Kong Enterprise offering. Relying heavily on these features can lead to vendor lock-in.
• Resource Footprint: While generally efficient, Kong, being built on Nginx/OpenResty, might have a slightly larger memory or CPU footprint than an ultra-optimized, bare-metal custom Go gateway for certain highly specific, extreme edge cases. However, for most practical applications, its performance is excellent.
• Complexity with Too Many Plugins: Over-reliance on a multitude of plugins, especially custom ones, can introduce complexity in troubleshooting, performance tuning, and overall management. It's crucial to strike a balance between leveraging existing features and over-customizing.

When to Choose Kong

Kong is an excellent choice for a wide range of organizations and scenarios:

• Most Common API Gateway Use Cases: If your requirements align with standard API gateway functionalities like authentication, rate limiting, routing, and logging, Kong offers a mature, battle-tested solution.
• Microservices Architectures: Kong's ability to easily manage routes to numerous backend services, coupled with its plugin-based extensibility, makes it a perfect fit for complex microservices deployments.
• Need for Rapid Deployment and Extensive Features: Organizations looking to quickly get their APIs to market with a rich set of features without extensive custom development will find Kong highly beneficial.
• Organizations Preferring Commercial Support and a Mature Ecosystem: For enterprises that prioritize vendor support, robust documentation, and a large, active community, Kong provides a secure and reliable choice.
• Cloud-Native Environments: Its strong integration with Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure makes it ideal for cloud-native applications.

In summary, Kong represents a powerful, feature-rich, and scalable option for most organizations. It reduces the development burden, accelerates time to market, and provides a robust foundation for managing a growing API ecosystem, making it a highly attractive choice for a diverse array of businesses.

Urfav (Your Custom Framework/Solution) – Tailored Abstraction

Beyond the extremes of building from scratch with a low-level language like Golang or adopting a comprehensive product like Kong, there exists a middle ground: developing a custom API gateway leveraging existing high-level frameworks or libraries within a familiar programming language. We'll term this "Urfav," short for "Your Custom Framework/Solution." This approach typically involves using frameworks in languages like Java (e.g., Spring Cloud Gateway), Node.js (e.g., Express.js with custom middleware), Python (e.g., FastAPI or Flask with a proxy), or .NET (e.g., Ocelot). It aims to strike a balance between the raw control of a Golang build and the out-of-the-box features of a product like Kong.

Interpreting "Urfav"

The "Urfav" category signifies building a gateway tailored to specific organizational needs, but without the extreme low-level effort of pure Golang. Instead, it capitalizes on:

• Existing Language and Framework Ecosystems: Leveraging the libraries, tooling, and development paradigms of a language already proficient within the organization (e.g., Java developers using Spring, Python developers using FastAPI).
• Higher-Level Abstractions: Using frameworks that provide foundational components for web servers, routing, and middleware, thereby avoiding the need to implement HTTP parsing or low-level socket handling.
• Domain-Specific Customization: The primary driver here is the need to embed specific business logic, unique integration points, or highly customized policies directly into the gateway itself, often because they are deeply intertwined with the organization's core domain.

This approach acknowledges that while Kong offers much, it might be too opinionated or restrictive for certain bespoke requirements, and a full Golang custom build is overkill for many scenarios.

Why Choose "Urfav"?

The decision to pursue an "Urfav" gateway typically arises from a desire to:

• Leverage Existing Team Language Skills: The most common reason is to capitalize on the existing expertise of the development team. If your organization is primarily a Java shop, building a gateway with Spring Cloud Gateway makes more sense than forcing them to learn Go or Lua (for Kong plugins). This reduces the learning curve, accelerates initial development, and streamlines ongoing maintenance.
• Integrate Deeply with Specific Frameworks or Ecosystems: If your backend services are heavily reliant on a particular framework (e.g., Spring Boot), building a gateway within that same ecosystem can offer tighter integration, shared configuration patterns, and easier observability.
• More Control Than Kong but Less Effort Than Pure Go: It offers a sweet spot: more customization possibilities than Kong (especially for integrating unique business logic) but significantly less effort than building everything from the ground up in Go, thanks to the abstractions provided by the chosen framework.

Advantages of "Urfav" Solutions

• Balances Control with Development Speed: Frameworks provide a solid foundation for common web server tasks, allowing developers to focus on implementing gateway-specific logic rather than reinventing the entire HTTP stack. This means faster development than raw Golang while still offering significant customization.
• Leverages Familiar Languages and Ecosystems: This translates directly to lower onboarding costs, quicker development cycles, and more efficient debugging. Developers can use their preferred IDEs, testing frameworks, and deployment tools.
• Customizable Without Starting from Scratch: Frameworks are inherently designed for extension. You can easily add custom middleware, filters, handlers, and services to implement bespoke routing rules, authentication mechanisms, data transformations, or specific business logic that directly impacts API calls.
• Good for Integrating Specialized Business Logic Directly: If your gateway needs to perform complex, domain-specific operations (e.g., advanced fraud detection on incoming requests, dynamic routing based on complex user profiles), embedding this logic directly within a familiar framework can be more straightforward than trying to fit it into a plugin architecture or building it entirely from scratch.
• Flexibility in Hosting and Deployment: Frameworks typically support various deployment models (containers, VMs, serverless functions), providing flexibility to choose the infrastructure that best suits the organization's needs and existing setup.

Even with the flexibility of a custom framework, managing the full API lifecycle, especially with the added complexity of AI model integration, can be daunting. This is where platforms like ApiPark provide immense value. APIPark offers end-to-end API lifecycle management, allowing teams to design, publish, invoke, and decommission APIs efficiently. Its features like API service sharing within teams, independent APIs and access permissions for each tenant, and performance rivaling Nginx can complement or even replace the need to build these advanced management capabilities into a custom "Urfav" solution, allowing your team to focus purely on the unique business logic that truly differentiates your gateway.

Disadvantages of "Urfav" Solutions

Despite their allure, "Urfav" gateways come with their own set of challenges:

• Still Requires Significant Development and Maintenance: While faster than raw Go, building a fully-featured, production-ready API gateway using a framework still demands substantial development effort. Core features like robust authentication, comprehensive rate limiting, and advanced security measures often need to be custom-implemented or integrated from various libraries, which can be time-consuming and prone to errors. Ongoing maintenance, including security patches, dependency updates, and feature enhancements, remains the responsibility of your internal team.
• Performance May Not Match Go or Optimized Gateways: While modern frameworks and languages (like Node.js or Java with Project Loom) are performant, they generally won't match the raw speed and low-level optimization potential of a meticulously crafted Golang gateway or a highly optimized C-based gateway like Nginx (which Kong leverages). The overhead of the runtime, garbage collection, and abstraction layers can introduce latency, especially under extreme load.
• Features Need to Be Built or Integrated Manually: Unlike Kong, which provides a rich ecosystem of pre-built plugins and a declarative configuration for most gateway features, an "Urfav" solution requires you to either build these features yourself or carefully select and integrate third-party libraries. This fragmentation can lead to inconsistencies, compatibility issues, and a higher cognitive load for developers.
• Long-Term Support and Maintenance Depend on Internal Team: The longevity and quality of the "Urfav" gateway are entirely dependent on the internal team's commitment and expertise. If key developers leave, or if the project loses internal advocacy, it can become a neglected piece of infrastructure, accumulating technical debt and security risks.
• Potential for Feature Creep: The very flexibility that makes "Urfav" attractive can also be its downfall. Without strict architectural discipline, the gateway can become a dumping ground for various business logic, blurring its core purpose and turning it into an overly complex, difficult-to-maintain monolith.

When to Choose "Urfav"

An "Urfav" approach is most suitable in specific contexts:

• Existing Strong Skillsets in a Particular Language/Framework: When an organization has deep expertise and a mature development ecosystem around a specific language (e.g., Java, Python, Node.js), leveraging this strength for the gateway can be highly efficient.
• Specific Business Logic Requiring Deep Integration: If your gateway needs to execute complex, application-specific business rules that are difficult or inefficient to implement as external services or generic plugins, an "Urfav" solution allows for seamless integration.
• Desire for a Balance Between Customization and Off-the-Shelf: When Kong's out-of-the-box features are either insufficient or overly prescriptive, but the extreme effort of raw Golang development is unwarranted, a framework-based approach offers a pragmatic middle ground.
• Need for a Specialized Development Experience: If the gateway needs to be tightly coupled with a specific internal developer platform or tooling, building it within the same language/framework can provide a more unified developer experience.

In essence, "Urfav" represents a practical compromise. It empowers teams to build tailored gateway solutions while standing on the shoulders of well-established frameworks, balancing the need for customization with the desire for development efficiency. It's a journey best undertaken by organizations with clear requirements, a strong internal engineering culture, and a commitment to long-term ownership of their critical infrastructure.

APIPark is a high-performance AI gateway that allows you to securely access the most comprehensive LLM APIs globally on the APIPark platform, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, Llama2, Google Gemini, and more.Try APIPark now! 👇👇👇

Beyond Traditional Gateway Functions – The Rise of AI Gateways and Modern API Management

The landscape of APIs is in a state of continuous evolution. What began as simple data exchange mechanisms has blossomed into complex orchestration layers, integral to microservices, serverless computing, and increasingly, artificial intelligence. As APIs become the lifeblood of digital innovation, the demands on the underlying API gateway have expanded dramatically, pushing beyond traditional functionalities like routing and rate limiting into realms of intelligent traffic management, unified AI model invocation, and comprehensive developer experiences. This paradigm shift has given rise to a new breed of gateways – those specifically designed to address the unique challenges of integrating and managing AI services.

The integration of artificial intelligence into applications introduces a novel set of complexities for API gateways:

• Diverse AI Models: Organizations often utilize a multitude of AI models from various providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, custom internal models), each with its own API specification, authentication mechanism, and billing structure.
• Unified Access: Exposing these diverse models through a consistent API interface to internal and external applications is a significant challenge. Developers shouldn't need to learn a new invocation pattern for every AI model they wish to use.
• Prompt Management: AI models, especially large language models (LLMs), rely heavily on "prompts" – the instructions given to the model. Managing, versioning, and securing these prompts, and encapsulating them into reusable APIs, becomes crucial for consistency and maintainability.
• Cost Tracking and Control: AI model invocations often incur usage-based costs. Granular cost tracking, quota enforcement, and budget management are essential for preventing runaway expenses.
• Security and Compliance: Ensuring that sensitive data processed by AI models remains secure and compliant with data governance regulations is paramount.

This evolving context highlights a gap that traditional API gateways, whether custom-built (Golang, Urfav) or off-the-shelf (Kong), may struggle to fill entirely without significant custom development. While these solutions can be extended to handle AI APIs, they often require substantial effort to build the specialized features needed for seamless AI integration and management.

APIPark's Role: An Open Source AI Gateway & API Management Platform

This is precisely where specialized solutions like ApiPark step in. APIPark is an open-source AI gateway and API management platform, designed from the ground up to tackle the unique challenges posed by modern API ecosystems, with a particular emphasis on AI model integration. It presents itself as a comprehensive, all-in-one solution that not only manages traditional REST services but also acts as a powerful orchestrator for AI models.

APIPark's Key Value Propositions:

1. Quick Integration of 100+ AI Models: Unlike generic gateways where integrating each AI model might require custom configuration or plugins, APIPark offers the capability to integrate a vast array of AI models with a unified management system for authentication and cost tracking. This dramatically reduces the complexity and time required to bring new AI capabilities online.
2. Unified API Format for AI Invocation: A cornerstone feature for AI integration, APIPark standardizes the request data format across all AI models. This means developers can interact with different AI services using a consistent API, ensuring that changes in underlying AI models or prompts do not necessitate modifications in the application layer or microservices. This simplification significantly reduces AI usage and maintenance costs.
3. Prompt Encapsulation into REST API: APIPark allows users to quickly combine AI models with custom prompts to create new, specialized APIs. For example, you can define a prompt for sentiment analysis and expose it as a simple REST API endpoint, abstracting the complexity of the underlying AI model interaction. This empowers developers to create powerful AI-driven services with minimal effort.
4. End-to-End API Lifecycle Management: Beyond just proxying, APIPark assists with managing the entire lifecycle of APIs, from design and publication to invocation and decommission. It helps regulate API management processes, manages traffic forwarding, load balancing, and versioning of published APIs, providing a holistic view and control over your digital assets.
5. API Service Sharing within Teams: The platform facilitates internal collaboration by offering a centralized display of all API services. This makes it easy for different departments and teams to discover, understand, and use the required API services, fostering a culture of reuse and efficiency within the enterprise.
6. Independent API and Access Permissions for Each Tenant: For larger organizations or those offering API services to multiple clients, APIPark supports multi-tenancy. It enables the creation of multiple teams (tenants), each with independent applications, data, user configurations, and security policies, while efficiently sharing underlying applications and infrastructure to improve resource utilization and reduce operational costs.
7. API Resource Access Requires Approval: Enhancing security and governance, APIPark allows for the activation of subscription approval features. This ensures that callers must subscribe to an API and await administrator approval before they can invoke it, preventing unauthorized API calls and potential data breaches.
8. Performance Rivaling Nginx: Despite its rich feature set and advanced capabilities, APIPark is engineered for high performance. With just an 8-core CPU and 8GB of memory, it can achieve over 20,000 Transactions Per Second (TPS), supporting cluster deployment to handle massive-scale traffic loads. This performance profile is comparable to highly optimized gateways, offering both power and flexibility.
9. Detailed API Call Logging: Comprehensive logging is crucial for observability and troubleshooting. APIPark provides granular logging capabilities, recording every detail of each API call. This feature is invaluable for businesses to quickly trace and troubleshoot issues in API calls, ensuring system stability and data security.
10. Powerful Data Analysis: Leveraging the detailed call data, APIPark analyzes historical trends to display long-term performance changes and usage patterns. This powerful data analysis helps businesses with proactive, preventive maintenance, identifying potential issues before they impact services, and optimizing resource allocation.

APIPark offers a compelling alternative or complement to custom Golang builds, Kong, or "Urfav" solutions, especially for organizations that are heavily invested in AI or require a robust, open-source platform for comprehensive API lifecycle management. While custom solutions require significant effort to build features like prompt management or unified AI invocation, APIPark provides these capabilities out-of-the-box, allowing teams to focus on their core business logic rather than infrastructure. For those using traditional gateways like Kong, APIPark extends their capabilities specifically for the AI domain, offering specialized features that streamline the integration and management of AI models in a performant and secure manner. Its quick deployment with a single command (curl -sSO https://download.apipark.com/install/quick-start.sh; bash quick-start.sh) further lowers the barrier to entry for robust API governance.

Critical Comparison Criteria for Your API Gateway Decision

Choosing the right API gateway is a multifaceted decision that extends far beyond a simple feature checklist. It requires a holistic assessment of your organization's technical capabilities, strategic objectives, operational realities, and financial constraints. To make an informed choice between Golang, Kong, and Urfav, it's essential to evaluate each option against a comprehensive set of critical criteria.

1. Performance and Scalability

• Transactions Per Second (TPS): How many requests per second can the gateway process without degradation?
• Latency: What is the average and percentile latency introduced by the gateway? This is crucial for real-time applications.
• Resource Consumption: How much CPU, memory, and network bandwidth does the gateway consume per request or per transaction?
• Horizontal Scalability: How easily can the gateway be scaled out horizontally by adding more instances to handle increasing load?
  • Golang: Extremely high performance potential if expertly coded, very low resource footprint. Excellent scalability by design (stateless instances).
  • Kong: Very high performance due to Nginx/OpenResty base, good resource efficiency. Excellent horizontal scalability through clustering.
  • Urfav: Performance varies significantly based on language and framework chosen. Can be good, but often with higher resource usage than Go/Kong. Scalability depends on framework and underlying infrastructure.
  • APIPark: Excellent performance (20,000+ TPS on modest hardware), Nginx-rivaling, designed for cluster deployment and large-scale traffic.

2. Feature Set

• Core Functionalities: Does it provide robust authentication (JWT, OAuth, API keys), authorization (ACL, RBAC), rate limiting, routing (path, host, header-based), load balancing, caching, and request/response transformations out-of-the-box or with minimal effort?
• Advanced Features: Are there capabilities for circuit breaking, retries, WAF integration, canary deployments, blue/green deployments, or serverless integrations?
• AI Integration Specifics: Does it natively support unified access to diverse AI models, prompt management, and cost tracking for AI invocations?
  • Golang: All features must be built from scratch, offering ultimate customization but demanding high effort.
  • Kong: Comprehensive feature set via a rich plugin ecosystem. Most common needs are covered.
  • Urfav: Core features require manual implementation or integration of libraries. Advanced features depend heavily on chosen framework's capabilities and custom work.
  • APIPark: Full lifecycle API management, extensive traditional gateway features, and specialized AI gateway features (100+ AI model integration, unified AI API, prompt encapsulation).

3. Flexibility and Customization

• Adaptability: How easily can the gateway adapt to unique business logic, non-standard protocols, or highly specific integration requirements?
• Extensibility: Can new features be added or existing ones modified without significant architectural changes or vendor lock-in?
  • Golang: Highest flexibility and customization as you control every line of code.
  • Kong: High flexibility through custom plugin development in Lua, Go, or JavaScript (for Enterprise).
  • Urfav: High flexibility within the chosen framework's paradigm. Can integrate custom logic easily.
  • APIPark: High flexibility in API lifecycle management, prompt customization for AI, and tenant-specific configurations.

4. Development and Operational Complexity

• Learning Curve: How steep is the learning curve for developers and operations teams to build, configure, deploy, and manage the gateway?
• Deployment: How complex is the deployment process (e.g., containerization, orchestration, environment setup)?
• Monitoring and Troubleshooting: How easy is it to monitor the gateway's health, diagnose issues, and troubleshoot problems in production?
• Maintenance: What is the ongoing effort required for updates, security patches, and bug fixes?
  • Golang: Highest complexity for both development and operations. Requires deep expertise.
  • Kong: Medium complexity. Learning curve for its configuration and plugin ecosystem. Good tooling for deployment (e.g., Kubernetes Ingress Controller).
  • Urfav: Medium-high complexity. Relies on team's familiarity with the chosen framework. Operational complexity depends on custom solutions for monitoring/deployment.
  • APIPark: Low complexity. Quick 5-minute deployment, intuitive management GUI, detailed logging, and data analysis.

5. Cost (Total Cost of Ownership - TCO)

• Licensing Fees: Are there any upfront or recurring costs for the software itself?
• Development Hours: What is the estimated labor cost for initial development and ongoing feature enhancements?
• Infrastructure Costs: What are the hardware/cloud resource requirements?
• Support Costs: Is commercial support available and what are its costs?
  • Golang: High TCO due to significant development and maintenance hours. No direct software cost.
  • Kong: Low TCO for open-source version (infrastructure, operations). Higher TCO for enterprise features and commercial support.
  • Urfav: Medium-High TCO. Development and maintenance costs can be substantial. No direct software cost.
  • APIPark: Low TCO for the open-source version, fast deployment, efficient resource usage. Commercial version available for advanced features and professional support.

6. Ecosystem and Community Support

• Community Size and Activity: How large and active is the community (documentation, forums, open-source contributions)?
• Third-Party Integrations: Are there existing integrations with other tools (e.g., CI/CD, observability platforms)?
• Commercial Support: Is professional, enterprise-grade support available from a vendor?
  • Golang: Strong general Go community, but specific gateway ecosystem needs to be built or curated by your team. No direct commercial support for your custom gateway.
  • Kong: Large and active open-source community, extensive plugin marketplace, robust commercial support from Kong Inc.
  • Urfav: Benefits from the vast ecosystem of the chosen language/framework. Specific gateway libraries might have varying levels of community support. No direct commercial support for your specific gateway.
  • APIPark: Open-source project with community, backed by Eolink, offering commercial support for enterprise needs.

7. Security Posture

• Built-in Security Features: Does it offer strong defaults for common attack vectors, secure configuration options, and robust authentication/authorization mechanisms?
• Compliance: Can it help meet specific industry compliance standards (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA)?
• Vulnerability Management: How are security vulnerabilities discovered, patched, and communicated?
  • Golang: Security is entirely your responsibility. High risk if not implemented by experts.
  • Kong: Strong security features via plugins, actively maintained by Kong Inc. and community. Good for compliance.
  • Urfav: Security relies on the chosen framework's security features and diligent custom implementation.
  • APIPark: Strong security features (access approval, independent tenant policies), backed by a company specializing in API governance, actively developed.

8. Observability and Monitoring

• Logging: Does it provide detailed, configurable logging for all API interactions, errors, and performance metrics?
• Metrics: Can it expose key performance indicators (KPIs) and health metrics in a format compatible with common monitoring systems (e.g., Prometheus, Datadog)?
• Tracing: Does it support distributed tracing to understand the full lifecycle of a request across multiple services?
  • Golang: All observability needs to be custom-built and integrated.
  • Kong: Excellent observability features through plugins (Prometheus, Datadog, Zipkin), detailed access logs.
  • Urfav: Depends on the chosen framework and external library integrations. Requires custom setup.
  • APIPark: Provides detailed API call logging and powerful data analysis for long-term trends and performance changes, aiding preventive maintenance.

9. Time to Market

• How quickly can a functional API gateway be deployed and start serving traffic?
  • Golang: Longest time to market due to extensive development required.
  • Kong: Shortest to medium time to market, as most features are ready to use.
  • Urfav: Medium time to market, faster than raw Go but slower than Kong for basic features.
  • APIPark: Very short time to market (5-minute deployment) for a full-featured AI gateway and API management platform.

By methodically evaluating each option against these criteria, organizations can develop a clearer picture of which API gateway best aligns with their specific context and strategic goals.

The Decision Matrix – When to Choose Which Gateway

Making the definitive choice for your API gateway is rarely about finding a universally "best" solution. Instead, it's about identifying the option that best fits your specific organizational context, technical requirements, team capabilities, and long-term strategic vision. Each of Golang (for custom builds), Kong, and Urfav (custom frameworks), along with specialized solutions like APIPark, shines brightest under different circumstances. Here, we present a scenario-based guidance to help illuminate the path.

When to Choose Golang (Custom Gateway):

• Extreme Performance and Latency Criticality: Your business model depends on millisecond responses (e.g., high-frequency trading, real-time gaming, ultra-low latency data processing). You need absolute control over every performance optimization.
• Highly Specialized Protocols or Unique Requirements: You are working with obscure network protocols, custom security schemes, or complex transformations that are beyond the scope of existing gateway products or would require cumbersome, performance-impacting customizations.
• Deep Technical Expertise and Resources: Your team possesses strong, seasoned expertise in Golang, network programming, distributed systems, and security, and you are willing to commit significant engineering resources to build, maintain, and continuously evolve this critical infrastructure.
• Complete Autonomy and Zero Vendor Lock-in: You desire total control over your infrastructure, are wary of external dependencies, and are prepared to own the entire lifecycle of your gateway.
• Consolidation with an Existing Go Ecosystem: Your existing microservices or critical infrastructure are predominantly written in Go, and you want to maintain a consistent technology stack and leverage shared libraries and tooling.

Example Scenario: A financial technology company processing millions of real-time transactions per second requires an API gateway that can handle custom financial protocols with sub-millisecond latency, integrate with their bespoke fraud detection algorithms written in Go, and maintain an extremely low memory footprint for cost efficiency. They have an expert team of Go engineers.

When to Choose Kong (Managed Gateway):

• Standard API Gateway Needs: Your requirements align with the common functionalities of an API gateway: authentication, authorization, rate limiting, routing, caching, observability, and basic transformations.
• Microservices and Cloud-Native Architectures: You are building or operating a microservices-based application, especially in a Kubernetes environment, and need a robust, scalable gateway that integrates well with modern cloud practices.
• Rapid Time to Market with Rich Features: You need to expose your APIs quickly with a comprehensive set of features, leveraging a mature product and its ecosystem rather than building everything from scratch.
• Preference for Commercial Support and Community: Your organization values the availability of professional commercial support, extensive documentation, and a large, active open-source community for troubleshooting and knowledge sharing.
• Extensibility through Plugins: You foresee the need for custom logic or integrations but prefer to implement them as plugins within a well-defined architecture rather than building the entire gateway.

Example Scenario: A growing e-commerce platform with hundreds of microservices needs to manage API traffic, enforce rate limits, authenticate users via JWT, and integrate with various logging and monitoring tools. They operate in a Kubernetes cluster and need to quickly deploy new API versions.

When to Choose Urfav (Custom Framework/Solution):

• Leveraging Existing Team Skills: Your development team is highly proficient in a specific language and its web framework (e.g., Java/Spring, Node.js/Express, Python/FastAPI), and you want to utilize this expertise for your gateway.
• Specific Business Logic in the Gateway: You require the gateway to embed complex, domain-specific business logic or unique routing decisions that are tightly coupled with your application's core concerns and are difficult to abstract into generic plugins.
• Balance Between Customization and Development Speed: You need more flexibility than Kong offers but find the development effort of a pure Golang build to be excessive for your current needs.
• Integrating with a Specific Application Ecosystem: Your gateway needs to integrate deeply with a particular framework's features or components (e.g., Spring Security for a Java-based gateway).
• Control Over Abstraction Layers: You prefer to have control over the choice of underlying libraries and components, even if it means more assembly work than Kong.

Example Scenario: A medium-sized enterprise with a strong Java development team needs an API gateway that can integrate with their existing Spring-based security framework, perform custom content-based routing decisions based on complex business rules, and connect to internal legacy systems via specific Java connectors.

When to Consider APIPark (AI Gateway & API Management Platform):

• AI-First or AI-Intensive Products: Your core product or services heavily rely on integrating and managing multiple AI models (LLMs, vision models, etc.) from various providers.
• Unified AI Model Access: You need to standardize access to diverse AI models through a single, consistent API interface for your internal and external developers.
• Prompt Management and Encapsulation: You require robust tooling for managing, versioning, and encapsulating AI prompts into reusable REST APIs.
• Comprehensive API Lifecycle Management: You are looking for an all-in-one platform that handles not just proxying but also the full lifecycle of your APIs – design, publication, invocation, versioning, and decommissioning.
• Multi-Tenancy and Team Collaboration: You need to support multiple teams or tenants with independent API configurations, access controls, and analytics, while also fostering API sharing and discovery.
• Performance with Specialized AI Features: You demand high performance (20k+ TPS) coupled with advanced AI integration capabilities and detailed observability for both traditional and AI APIs.
• Open-Source with Commercial Support: You value the flexibility of an open-source solution but also appreciate the option of professional commercial support for enterprise deployments.

Example Scenario: A startup building an AI-powered content generation platform needs to integrate multiple LLMs (OpenAI, Anthropic, custom models), unify their API invocation, manage a library of prompts, and provide a developer portal for third-party access, all while tracking usage and performance efficiently. They need a quick-to-deploy, high-performance solution that understands AI.

No single API gateway solution is a panacea. The optimal choice is a reflection of your current state, your desired future, and the careful weighing of trade-offs. Organizations must realistically assess their engineering capabilities, the criticality of their performance needs, the complexity of their security and compliance requirements, and the strategic importance of rapid iteration versus deep customization.

Conclusion – Charting Your API Gateway Journey

The API gateway stands as an indispensable cornerstone in the architecture of modern digital enterprises. It is the intelligent nexus through which digital capabilities are exposed, managed, and secured, fundamentally influencing an organization's agility, resilience, and capacity for innovation. The journey to select the right gateway – whether a bespoke solution meticulously crafted with Golang, a feature-rich, battle-tested product like Kong, a custom framework-based approach (Urfav), or a specialized AI-centric platform like APIPark – is a critical strategic decision, not merely a technical one.

As we've explored, there is no universally "best" API gateway; rather, there is the most appropriate gateway for your unique context.

• Golang offers unparalleled control, raw performance, and resource efficiency, ideal for organizations with extraordinary, non-standard requirements and the deep engineering talent to build and maintain complex, high-performance systems from the ground up. It’s a path for those who seek to push the boundaries of what’s possible, understanding the significant investment in development and ongoing ownership.
• Kong provides a robust, feature-rich, and scalable solution for the vast majority of API gateway use cases. Its extensive plugin ecosystem, strong community, and commercial support accelerate time to market, reduce operational overhead, and integrate seamlessly into microservices and cloud-native environments. It's the pragmatic choice for organizations that need a powerful, proven gateway without reinventing the wheel.
• Urfav (Custom Framework/Solution) strikes a valuable balance, allowing organizations to leverage existing team skills and familiar technology stacks while still achieving a significant degree of customization. It’s a sensible middle ground for those whose needs are beyond generic solutions but do not warrant the extreme effort of a pure Golang build, offering flexibility within a more abstracted development paradigm.
• APIPark emerges as a compelling, specialized solution for the evolving demands of the API economy, particularly for organizations heavily invested in AI. As an open-source AI gateway and API management platform, it uniquely addresses the complexities of integrating diverse AI models, unifying their invocation, managing prompts, and providing a comprehensive developer portal. Its high performance, rapid deployment, and focus on end-to-end API lifecycle governance offer a powerful alternative, especially where AI is a core differentiator, significantly reducing the burden of building these specialized capabilities into a custom gateway or extending a traditional one.

The decision-making process must involve a thorough self-assessment:

• What are your non-negotiable requirements? Is it sub-millisecond latency, extreme customization, ease of AI model integration, or rapid feature delivery?
• What is your team's existing skill set and capacity? Can you realistically commit to the long-term development and maintenance of a custom solution, or would you benefit from an off-the-shelf product with community/commercial backing?
• What is your strategic roadmap? Will your gateway need to support new protocols, massive scaling, or specialized AI services in the future?
• What is your budget for infrastructure, development, and operational support?

Ultimately, the chosen API gateway is more than just a piece of technology; it's a strategic enabler for your digital business. It dictates how efficiently your services communicate, how securely your data is exchanged, and how rapidly you can innovate. By carefully considering the intricate details of Golang, Kong, Urfav, and specialized platforms like ApiPark, you can chart a gateway journey that not only addresses your immediate needs but also future-proofs your architecture against the ever-accelerating pace of digital transformation.

---

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

1. What is the primary difference between building a custom API gateway with Golang and using a product like Kong? The primary difference lies in control versus convenience. Building a custom API gateway with Golang offers ultimate control over every aspect of its functionality, allowing for extreme performance optimization and highly specialized features tailored precisely to your needs. However, this comes at the cost of significant development effort, time, and ongoing maintenance. Kong, on the other hand, provides a feature-rich, battle-tested API gateway out-of-the-box, with extensive plugins covering most common requirements, accelerating time to market and reducing development burden. While extensible, it offers less low-level control than a custom Golang solution.

2. When would an organization opt for a "Urfav" (Custom Framework/Solution) API gateway instead of Kong or a pure Golang build? An organization would choose a "Urfav" solution when they need more flexibility and specific business logic integration than Kong typically offers, but without the immense development overhead of building a gateway entirely from scratch in Golang. This approach leverages existing team skills in a particular language/framework (e.g., Spring Cloud Gateway in Java, FastAPI in Python), balancing customization needs with faster development cycles by utilizing established framework components. It's ideal when specific domain knowledge needs to be deeply embedded within the gateway itself.

3. How does APIPark differentiate itself from traditional API gateways like Kong or custom-built solutions? APIPark distinguishes itself by focusing as an AI gateway and comprehensive API management platform. While traditional gateways handle general API traffic, APIPark is specifically designed to manage and integrate over 100 AI models with a unified API format, enable prompt encapsulation into REST APIs, and provide end-to-end API lifecycle management. It offers high performance rivaling Nginx, detailed logging, and data analysis, making it uniquely suited for organizations that are heavily invested in AI services and require advanced governance, developer portals, and multi-tenancy capabilities beyond standard gateway functions.

4. What are the key considerations for performance and scalability when choosing an API gateway? When evaluating performance and scalability, consider the required Transactions Per Second (TPS), the acceptable latency introduced by the gateway, and its resource consumption (CPU, memory) per request. Also, assess its ability to scale horizontally by adding more instances to handle increasing load. Golang offers the highest potential for raw, low-latency performance if expertly built, while Kong and APIPark provide excellent performance through optimized architectures (Nginx/OpenResty base) and are designed for horizontal scalability in clustered deployments. Custom framework solutions (Urfav) vary widely based on the chosen technology stack.

5. What is the role of an API gateway in ensuring API security, and which option excels in this area? An API gateway plays a critical role in API security by centralizing authentication, authorization, rate limiting, and often WAF functionalities, acting as the first line of defense. All options can achieve a high level of security, but the effort and expertise required differ. Kong excels in providing robust, pre-built security features via its extensive plugin ecosystem and benefits from ongoing maintenance by Kong Inc. and its community. APIPark offers strong security features like access approval workflows and independent security policies for tenants. Custom Golang or Urfav gateways offer ultimate control but place the entire responsibility for security implementation and patching on the development team, which requires deep expertise to do correctly.

🚀You can securely and efficiently call the OpenAI API on APIPark in just two steps:

Step 1: Deploy the APIPark AI gateway in 5 minutes.

APIPark is developed based on Golang, offering strong product performance and low development and maintenance costs. You can deploy APIPark with a single command line.

curl -sSO https://download.apipark.com/install/quick-start.sh; bash quick-start.sh

In my experience, you can see the successful deployment interface within 5 to 10 minutes. Then, you can log in to APIPark using your account.

Step 2: Call the OpenAI API.