Kong Brings Breakthrough API and Microservices Connectivity Into the End-User Era With New Managed Service

Kong Konnect Gives Developers, Architects and Operators Instant Access to Kong’s Award-Winning Enterprise Products to Accelerate, Automate and Secure Service Connectivity

Today at the virtual Kong Summit 2020 conference, Kong Inc. unveiled the private beta release of Kong Konnect, a full-stack platform for cloud native applications delivered as a service. Running on any cloud or platform, Kong Konnect provides end users with instant access to a comprehensive suite of tools that enable reliable and secure service connectivity across their APIs and microservices. It helps developers, architects and operators simplify complex workflows across API gateway, Kubernetes Ingress and service mesh runtimes. This allows Kong Konnect users to accelerate application development cycles by seamlessly delivering connectivity at the edge, within their applications and between applications.

Kong Konnect uses a modular approach, in which end users can access capabilities delivered as functional modules and provision different types of runtimes on-demand without requiring purchase of the entire platform. Users will be able to select and consume only the features they need directly through the Kong Konnect interface, removing barriers to building next-generation applications and services.

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At the heart of Kong Konnect is the new ServiceHub, which creates a single source of truth for all services in an organization. It also features a first-of-its-kind runtime manager that enables consistent, self-service provisioning and day-2 operations of Kong runtimes across different cloud and Kubernetes providers, as well as on-premises. Using Kong Konnect, individuals within a technical organization can access the capabilities that they need for their roles through a unified interface. Developers can find and consume services through a comprehensive online catalog, operators can deploy runtimes on any environment with the click of a button, and architects can get a comprehensive view of all services across the organization.

According to Evans Data Corporation, the world’s population of developers is expected to reach 28.7 million by 2024. As companies are transitioning to distributed architectures and service-driven applications, technology teams need tools that focus on helping individuals better automate, secure and govern the way their APIs and microservices connect and exchange information. Until now, enterprise-class tools for managing APIs and microservices were designed and distributed with a “top-down,” large enterprise-only mentality. This yielded poor ease-of-use and high cost, which created a barrier to adoption by smaller organizations and smaller teams within large organizations. Kong Konnect is inverting this mindset by offering user-centric capabilities and reducing cost-based barriers to entry by enabling the purchase of Kong Konnect through a simple credit card transaction.

“It has long been a dream at Kong to empower frontline developers around the world with the best tools for connecting and managing their applications and services,” said Marco Palladino, CTO and co-founder of Kong Inc. “Kong Konnect will power connections for everyone with a full-stack solution that goes from gateway to mesh and can run on every cloud and platform – including Kubernetes and VMs – to help developers focus their talents on application design and feature development, not on building pipes and writing redundant networking and security code for each service on each platform. We are proud to bust the confines of yesterday’s rigid ‘platform’ model and offer our powerful tools via a breakthrough usage-based model unlike anything available on the market today.”

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The Kong Konnect ‘Un-Platform’ Offers Connections for Everyone

Kong Konnect provides universal service connectivity and management that is reliable, observable and secure across any infrastructure. With its modular design, it breaks the rigid “platform” model of yesterday and enables ad hoc usage of any module or group of modules that work together, bringing it within reach of every developer, operator and architect from any sized company. This allows developers to focus on building business logic, architects to focus on accelerating time to value and operators to focus on connectivity management.

For organizations that want to use the platform as a whole, Kong Konnect integrates Kong’s API Gateway, Ingress Controller and Kong Mesh for end-to-end connectivity across any cloud, platform and protocol to help teams build powerful digital services and experiences.

Key features of Kong Konnect will include:

• Modular Self-Service Purchasing – Individuals can purchase only the capabilities they need for their specific project on a self-service basis.
• Role-Specific Workflows – Individual user roles can be crafted to provide broad-based or narrowly scoped access to specific features, sets of services and privileges based on an individual team or organization’s needs.
• Kong ServiceHub – ServiceHub provides a single source of truth for all of an organization’s services. Users can socialize services across their organizations to optimize discovery and re-use.
• Kong Vitals – Users are able to monitor Kong services and transactions in real time to understand their health and optimize their performance.
• Kong Runtime Manager – Users can provision and manage Kong’s cloud native connectivity runtimes for Kong Gateway, Kubernetes Ingress and Kong Mesh on any cloud, Kubernetes provider or on-premises environments.
• Kong Developer Portal – The portal allows users to document and publish their services as products.
• Insomnia Integration – Developers can instantly launch Insomnia from the ServiceHub and leverage Insomnia’s powerful API design, debugging and testing capabilities to increase productivity. From Insomnia, developers can sync their work and collaborate through a Git repository, thus enabling a seamless integration into DevOps workflows.

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Supporting Quotes:

“Kong has allowed us to bring more services to market more quickly and better manage those services once they’re in production – we were able to create more than 450 new digital services within just six months and achieved up to 65-times faster deployment with automated validations,” said Colin Schaub, lead API engineer at Cargill. “As a Kong Konnect beta user, we’re excited to see how Kong Konnect will help reduce the complexity of our deployments and provide a centralized control plane, which will be a big value-add that will make our lives easier.”

“Kong has made it possible for us to support multi-cloud and hybrid use cases, and gives us the flexibility to run on Kubernetes, which was a key factor for us,” said Morten Lykkegaard Andersen, senior information technology specialist at Vestas, a sustainable energy company. “We are interested in Kong Konnect because it will simplify our infrastructure landscape and allow us to decommission our Cassandra database. Our internal time to market is already twice as fast with Kong Enterprise, and we expect Kong Konnect to further accelerate our team’s productivity.”

“Having been users of Kong since the beginning, we’re excited to see the possibilities with Kong Konnect,” said Travis Koenig, VP of Engineering and Architecture at RealPage. “We are always looking for ways to reduce operational overhead and allow more focus on core business outcomes. Kong’s continued devotion to ensuring its products can run anywhere, supporting the reality of enterprise hybrid deployments, makes Kong Konnect an exciting offering.”

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