Looking At Five Proxies
This is a first dive into market research around “proxies”. I won’t be looking at all the proxies out there, but taking a sampling of five most relevant proxies to what we are looking to build at Naftiko, and provide a first round of research into what features they offer and what use cases they are targeting.
I limited this work to the following five “proxies”. I put in quotes, because they are much more than that. To do this research I spend time going through the website and documentation of each company and product. I copy and paste any pages I feel are relevant to what we are building, and provides an accurate representation of what is being offered by each company. I then take the content I accumulate and I ask claude for a list of all the features and use cases outlined in the content I provided.
- Envoy Proxy (Features) (Use Cases)
- Ngrok (Features) (Use Cases)
- Traefik Labs (Features) (Use Cases)
- Solo kgateway (Features) (Use Cases)
- Gravitee (Features) (Use Cases)
It is hard to separate what is a proxy, what is a reverse proxy, and what is a forward proxy. Then it gets muddy with when a proxy becomes a gateway, let alone what all the types of gateways that are in effect (data, API, event, AI, etc.) I did not do the work to separate these layers of features–I feel this is the next wave of work that has to be done to help us build the Naftiko framework, but also shape the narrative in the ecosystem around what differentiates ourselves from what everyone else is building.
Once I gathered the features and use cases for these “proxies”, I asked Claude to provide me with a comparison of features across all the proxies. Next I think we need to discuss what the first set of features we will be offering, and what label we use to describe that. Then I think we have to begin drawing clear boundaries around what proxies are and what gateways are, and how they work with the Naftiko Fabric, as well as Naftiko Fabric. Let me know if there are more gateways we should, and if there are other areas I should be looking at when evaluating these companies and their offerings as part of market research.