We've been using openresty in production at vwo.com at our edge nodes for quite a few years. It's really fantastic, allowing you to write custom logic and embed it within nginx itself, making things super fast.

The only real disadvantage is the lack of a good library ecosystem within lua and openresty. Over the years, as we moved some more logic to edge because $reasons, we ended up rolling our own libs quite a few times. Documentation can be made much easier as well.

That, and the occasional limitations of Lua as a language.

Overall though, quite an awesome project.

We love OpenResty! One of our principal engineers was recently named a core maintainer of the project

Since Kong 1.0 it can run in both centralized or decentralized mode as a sidecar for Service Mesh. And since v1.1 the database can even be optional. We are executing very fast with the feedback of the community and our customers.

Ah, cool!

This was the primary reason for us to custom build.

I’ll be starting a new project in a few weeks. Will revisit kong for sure to have a look.

I once had to implement a giant ip address blacklist for an api in the fastest and cheapest way possible. Openresty and redis saved me that day. That has been my favorite project that I've ever worked on. Two amazing pieces of software. Kong is great, too. We were just unable to use it because its blacklist feature wasn't easy to implement.

Yeah, great stuff from awesome people!

Did not mention it, but of course we used redis to keep track of the rates. :)

What problems did you specifically encounter with the current bundled blacklist plugin?

This was about 3 years ago. We needed to get millions of IP addresses into the blacklist, with daily updates. We tried using Cassandra for the backed. Not sure if it's easier now but yeah that would have been more of a pain to accomplish.