In addition to traffic control, Kong Gateway can manage authentication, request transformations, analytics, and logging. Whether those upstream services are web servers or databases or even Minecraft game servers, Kong is the front-door greeter to all requests. Kong Gateway is a thin API gateway layer that sits in front of upstream services, capable of performing these port forwarding and load balancing tasks. In the case of a replica failing completely, the load balancer ensures that requests only go to healthy nodes. The load balancer, however, distributes the request load to prevent any one server from being overwhelmed. They believe they’re making requests to a single server. The outside world is unaware that there are multiple replicas of a server running.
Minecraft servers software#
A specific piece of hardware or software called a load balancer usually handles this. Load balancing is the task of distributing multiple requests to a server in a balanced manner across numerous replicas of that server. Meanwhile, requests addressed to port 5432 would be forwarded to your database server at port 5000. Requests addressed to port 80 would be forwarded by the gateway to your web server at port 3000. Your API gateway would listen for requests from outside your network. For example, you might have a web server listening on port 3000 and a database server listening on port 5000. A router, firewall or API gateway usually handles this task. Port forwarding is receiving network requests on a certain port of a machine and forwarding those requests to a different port. We're going to do this by spinning up multiple Minecraft servers, and then placing Kong Gateway in front of these upstream services to handle port forwarding and load balancing.īefore we dive in, let's briefly cover a few important technology concepts.
In this article, we're going to explore port forwarding and load balancing with Kong Gateway. One server won't be enough, so you'll run two servers simultaneously, expecting your load balancer to handle sending students to Server A or Server B, depending on the load. You need to run your own Minecraft servers to ensure a kid-friendly multiplayer environment, restricted only to your students. Here's the scenario: You're organizing a full-day Minecraft class for local STEM students.
Sure, tell your colleagues or your family that you're doing research, experimenting with some new tech-because that is what we'll be doing-but just don't let them see you playing Minecraft!