FAQs

Initially, deploying a single proxy per environment serves as a good starting point. However, the necessity for multiple proxies may emerge under specific circumstances such as the need for horizontal scaling to accommodate peak traffic loads due to limitations on the number of concurrent API calls a single proxy can handle (detailed benchmarks can be found in our performance documentation), ensuring high availability and failover capabilities (automatically replacing a failed proxy with a new one), or managing traffic more efficiently by segregating it across different proxies based on tenant separation, geographical regions, and other criteria.

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

Conversely, Lunar.dev's UI Control Plane is a SaaS (Software as a Service) offering that provides centralized control over all Lunar.dev components. 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 functionality, including control over API traffic and a single API proxy with a control plane, alongside access to basic plugins and flows. In contrast, the paid versions offer significant enhancements tailored to meet the demands of more complex and high-volume environments:

• Scalable Proxy Support: Facilitates handling higher traffic volumes with the ability to scale the Lunar proxy on demand.
• Failover and Load Balancing: Offers robust mechanisms essential for maintaining uptime and performance in production environments.
• Premium Features: Access to premium plugins and advanced flows designed for intricate use-cases, extending beyond the capabilities of the free version.
• Enhanced collaboration: through a shared UI control plane, enabling teams to define and manage policies across multiple proxies efficiently.

These advantages make the paid versions ideal for businesses looking for comprehensive API management solutions to support their growth and operational complexity.

API calls routed through the Lunar forward-proxy incur minimal latency, with a maximum latency impact of only 4ms in the P95 percentile. Leveraging the capabilities of HAProxy, Lunar continuously reduces latency overhead. The benefits gained from tunneling calls through the Lunar proxy outweigh a negligible latency impact.Read the detailed report of our latency solution and 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, we're minded to help optimize usage and maintenance costs on the API consumer side. Lunar is the only centralized solution to view, control and fix API scaling problems, maintenance costs and performance issues.

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.

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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.