Kong Unveils First Cloud Native API Platform Built for DevOps-Driven Automation Across Hybrid Environments

Kong Enterprise 2.1 Features ‘Hybrid Mode’ for Efficiently Managing High-Performing, Complex Use Cases on a Fast, Lightweight Architecture

Kong Inc., the leading cloud connectivity company, announced the general availability of a major new release of Kong Enterprise that enables DevOps-driven automation for running APIs and microservices across multiple clouds and data centers. The industry’s only cloud native, full lifecycle API platform, Kong Enterprise 2.1 provides flexible, multi-cloud, multi-region deployment options with native service mesh support via the newly released Kong Mesh to streamline underlying infrastructure and reduce operational costs.

Kong introduced a new ‘Hybrid Mode’ deployment option that enables customers to use declarative configuration to deploy cloud native Kong Gateway data planes across multiple clouds and data centers, and manage them through a central control plane. This release provides numerous improvements and enhanced integrations across the entire Kong Enterprise service connectivity platform to allow organizations of all sizes to accelerate adoption of modern architectures. With this release, Kong Enterprise 2.1 is the only full lifecycle solution that provides the scale, performance and end-to-end simplicity needed to efficiently manage multi-cloud and multi-data center deployments.

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By 2022, IDC predicts more than 90 percent of enterprises worldwide will be relying on a mix of on-premises/dedicated private clouds, multiple public clouds and legacy platforms to meet their infrastructure needs. Organizations across industries are transitioning to hybrid cloud architectures and service-driven applications to gain greater flexibility and scalability. In addition, cloud native deployments are growing fast and getting larger. A recent survey by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) revealed the vast majority (78 percent) of respondents now use Kubernetes in production environments, up from 58 percent the prior year. The enhanced Kong Enterprise provides a cohesive platform for end-to-end automation of APIs to lower the barrier for companies to start using microservices, while simplifying ongoing management of more complex architectural patterns. It also helps decrease costs by limiting footprint and reduces the potential modes of failure that could cause downtime.

“Moving to the Cloud continues to be a priority for FactSet,” said Demetry Zilberg, SVP and Senior Director of Global Infrastructure, FactSet. “Our team is excited about Kong Enterprise 2.1’s new Hybrid Mode as it will help us deploy our API endpoints across several cloud providers, in addition to on-prem, with centralized orchestration. This ability will provide the multi-cloud and multi-region flexibility we need to scale effectively and provide a more seamless experience for clients.”

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Key features of Kong Enterprise 2.1 include:

• Hybrid Mode: Customers can now run Kong data plane instances across multiple data centers, clouds and geographies without needing to run a Cassandra deployment that also spans the data planes. This eliminates an expensive and time-consuming dependency to provide greater deployment flexibility and lower operational costs.
• End-to-End API DevOps: Kong Enterprise 2.1 can be combined with the latest Kong Studio plugins included in Insomnia to further automate the API lifecycle. Users can declaratively configure their runtimes to dynamically adapt to evolving traffic conditions across hybrid environments.
• Expanded Plugin Ecosystem With Go: Kong plugins can now be built entirely in the popular Golang programming language, opening up Kong’s ecosystem to vastly more developers and making onboarding to Kong Enterprise easier.
• Superior App Registration: Support for any OIDC-compliant IdP in the Developer Portal app registration process means it’s even easier to fit Kong into a customer’s technology stack. With Kong Enterprise 2.1, app registration becomes fully supported so API consumers can self-serve their access to APIs in the Developer Portal for a better consumer experience.
• Increased Visibility and Reporting: A new Kong Vitals interface in Kong Manager lets operators view usage dashboards as well as generate and export reports, giving easier access to all metrics collected by Kong Vitals over a greater period of time.
• Native Service Mesh Connectivity: Kong Enterprise can be used as a service mesh ingress and egress with a native data plane integration with Kong Mesh – Kong’s enterprise service mesh built on top of CNCF’s Kuma and Envoy – on both Kubernetes and VMs and across multiple clouds.

“We are thrilled to release the second generation of Kong Enterprise, which we created to support the hybrid workloads that are critical for companies of all sizes,” said Marco Palladino, CTO and co-founder of Kong Inc. “As technology teams build services and applications on Kubernetes and other platforms that span multiple availability zones, data centers and clouds, they need to ensure that service connectivity is reliable and performant. Kong Enterprise is the only enterprise-grade platform providing an API gateway, Kubernetes Ingress Controller and service mesh, with the ability to run data planes decoupled from their control planes. This allows customers to more rapidly adopt and scale microservices without the cost and pain of needing to scale and maintain lots of dependencies.”

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