[monatron]

I work on a project that leverages Kong's API Gateway, which is essentially Nginx + Openresty (Lua) + Kong (More Lua). The killer feature wrt Kong is the plugin ecosystem, which (among other things) allows you to act on the request/response lifecycle at various stages. Developers coming onboard to the project usually have little to no experience writing Lua, but we've found that coming up to speed on the language and it's runtime to be fairly painless. These days Kong has shims to write plug-in code in a few different languages (javascript, python, go, and more recently a wasm runtime) but despite our teams unfamiliarity with the language we still go back to Lua because performance can't be beat.