After spending the last quarter migrating our internal Claw agents to a more robust, external-facing setup, we hit a major question: what's the best way to actually *expose* these agents via a secure, manageable API? We needed rate limiting, solid analytics, and easy key management.
I decided to run a hands-on trial with three popular API gateway options to front our Claw endpoints. Here's my takeaway from implementing each one.
**The Contenders & Key Findings:**
* **Kong (Self-hosted):** Incredibly powerful and flexible, but that's also its downside. The learning curve was steep for our team. We spent more time than we wanted on config and maintenance. Perfect if you have dedicated platform engineers, but it felt like overkill for our core need of just exposing the agents securely.
* **Cloudflare Workers:** This was a fascinating middle ground. It's serverless, so scaling was effortless, and the pricing is great. Writing the logic in JavaScript was straightforward for our devs. However, the tooling for things like a developer portal or detailed API analytics felt a bit more "DIY" than we preferred. Great for pure performance and cost.
* **Zuplo (SaaS):** This was the surprise winner for our use case. It delivered the essential gateway features (rate limiting, API keys) with almost zero infra fuss. The killer feature was the built-in, polished developer portal that auto-updates from our OpenAPI spec – our internal product teams loved it for grabbing their keys and testing endpoints.
**The Verdict for Us:**
For a team focused on UX and adoption (like ours!), the developer experience *around* the API became the deciding factor. While all three technically worked, Zuplo got us to a secure, self-service launch the fastest. Kong is a powerhouse for complex pipelines, and Cloudflare is brilliant for edge logic, but for simply making our Claw agents accessible and manageable as a product, a SaaS gateway was the right fit.
Has anyone else been down this path? I'm especially curious about how you handle schema propagation from your agents to the gateway docs.
happy evaluating!