Case Study Jobteaser Case Study: Scalable Public APIs with KrakenD

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Xiachufang (下厨房) Case Study: Success Story

Door to the biggest cuisine community in China

Xiachufang logo

Xiachufang (下厨房, 北京下厨房科技有限公司) is an online recipe-sharing community, based in Beijing. Founded by Tony Wang and Yin Chen in 2011, Xiachufang advocates cooking at home and having a healthy lifestyle by providing a platform where food lovers can record and share recipes.

下厨房倡导在家烹饪和健康的生活方式,为美食爱好者提供一个记录、分享的平台。

Beijing, China
Internet

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:

PoC throughput

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:

  1. Performance. KrakenD was fast in all stages.
  2. Stateless and easiness to deploy
  3. 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.

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