FAQs

While deploying a single lunar.dev gateway per environment serves as a good starting point for evaluation, the necessity for multiple gateways may emerge under specific circumstances such as the need for horizontal scaling to accommodate peak traffic loads, ensuring high availability and failover capabilities, or managing traffic more efficiently by load balancing based on tenant separation, geographical regions, or other business or infrastructure criteria.

Lunar.dev's infrastructure, is installed and managed directly within your own cloud infrastructure. This approach ensures that all data related to API calls and their payloads are exclusively managed and stored locally, providing full control over your data with no external exposure. 

Lunar.dev's UI Control Plane is a SaaS component (Software as a Service) offering centralized control and visibility. The data shown in the UI includes system telemetry, system usage, and aggregated metrics on API volumes. Importantly, this data sharing aspect of the SaaS offering can be disabled by the customer, offering flexibility in how much information is transmitted and reflected in the UI.

The free version of Lunar.dev provides essential capabilities, including control over API traffic and a single instance of the Lunar Consumption Gateway, along with access to standard Lunar Flows (policies).

In contrast, the paid versions unlock features designed for complex, high-volume environments, with the key differentiator being scalability:

• Scalable Gateway Cluster: The free version is limited to a single instance of the Lunar Consumption Gateway, whereas the paid versions offer a scalable cluster of Lunar gateways. This cluster architecture shares a Redis-backed state across multiple instances, making it ideal for production environments and growing businesses.
• Failover and Load Balancing: The cluster setup ensures robust failover mechanisms and load balancing, enabling traffic distribution across multiple gateways. This guarantees uptime and reliability, even if one gateway instance goes down.
• Premium Flows and Custom Capabilities: Paid tiers include access to advanced, custom-made Lunar Flows tailored for intricate use cases, along with increased volume handling for API calls managed by the system.

These enhancements make the paid versions well-suited for businesses seeking comprehensive API consumption management, with robust scalability and high availability for their production needs.

‍

API calls routed through the Lunar.dev's Consumption Gateway experience minimal additional latency. The maximum latency impact observed is only 4ms at the P95 percentile. By leveraging HAProxy and continuous optimizations, it keeps latency overhead to a bare minimum.

For more details, you can review our comprehensive latency and benchmarking analysis and report of how we benchmark.

Lunar.dev is the only solution minded to optimizing and centralizing the management of consumed 3rd party APIs across organizations. Rather than setting controls on the API provider's side, it's designed to elevate your existing 3rd party integrations, simplify their management, optimize usage and maintenance costs on the API consumer side. Lunar.dev is the only centralized solution to view, control and fix API scaling problems, and performance issues - in one place.

Lunar is deployed entirely within your cloud environment, ensuring that no API calls or sensitive Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and customer data are routed to our SaaS infrastructure. The data transmitted to our infrastructure solely consists of system heartbeat, configurations, and telemetry information. Get in touch to get more details about our security measures at info@lunar.dev.

Our recommendation is to deploy a Lunar forward-proxy per node. With the free Lunar version, you gain the ability to address and optimize API consumption issues on a per-node basis in real-time. When it comes to your scaled production environment, it may be necessary to scale your Lunar proxy instances across multiple nodes, implementing unified policies and shared states among all services and nodes. Imagine the advantages of having shared API caching across your clusters. To cater to these specific requirements, we are developing Lunar Pro, designed for resilience at scale in robust production environments. If you're interested in learning more, please reach out to us at info@lunar.dev.

We know the build-vs.buy dilemma. We believe leaving API integrations unmanaged equals more technical debt, and similarly, that building your API middleware will cause you exponential maintenance and issues as you scale. In the Beta Version, implementing Lunar requires a simple import of our supported interceptors via SDK and a one-line installation of the Lunar forward proxy. Removing Lunar is also as simple as that. it is just as easy as if it never existed. Read more about it in this post.

We recognize that the way you incorporate third-party APIs into your application is part of a carefully crafted business logic specific to your needs. We do not claim to outperform your implementation but to simplify enhancing and optimizing your business logic without requiring any code changes. This means that you have full control over configuring the various API plugins according to your specific requirements.

Our platform provides a wide range of configurable API middleware, offering insights on potential improvements based on our accumulated knowledge. Engineers can autonomously choose how to implement the plugins and enforce policies tailored to your unique environment.

‍

In addition to our OSS and self-hosted version, you can request access to our beta SaaS version, and inquire more information at info@lunar.dev.