Kong Inc. Launches Kong 1.0, the Only Open Source API Platform Purpose Built for Microservices, Cloud-Native and Serverless Architectures

By AIT News Desk On Sep 19, 2018

Company’s first footprint in its vision to build a universal service control platform to intelligently broker all information flowing across any service

Kong Inc., the leading API platform for modern architectures, today launched Kong 1.0, the latest version of Kong’s core open source technology that incorporates learnings from three years of production experience for a fully featured offering. Developers, DevOps engineers and solutions architects at organizations ranging from startups to Fortune 500 enterprises use Kong to effectively secure, connect and orchestrate APIs within modern architectures to help meet evolving demands for scalability, performance and flexibility.

The company introduced Kong 1.0 today at Kong Summit 2018, an inaugural event bringing attendees together to inform and inspire them as they transition toward cloud-native, microservices architectures in today’s hybrid world. Kong 1.0 serves as the foundation for the company’s vision of building a s ervice control platform that leverages artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, API security and other break-through technologies to intelligently broker and secure the flow of all information to and from any service.

Ongoing support and contributions from the open source community have made Kong the most widely used open source API platform, including more than 45 million downloads. Today, Kong 1.0 is feature-complete. It combines sub-millisecond low latency, linear scalability and unparalleled flexibility with a robust feature set, support for service meshpatterns, Kubernetes Ingress controller and backward compatibility between versions. Service mesh support enables Kong to be deployed alongside each instance to broker information flow between services and automatically scale as those services scale. Through Kong’s Kubernetes Ingress controller, users can tie directly to the Kubernetes lifecycle. As applications are deployed and new services are created, Kong automatically live configures itself to serve traffic to these services. Additionally, new migrations functionality eases any necessary migrations from one database schema to another with zero downtime when upgrading to a new version of Kong.

“Kong 1.0 represents a momentous milestone as we progress toward our larger vision of moving beyond traditional API management to intelligently broker the flow of all information and act as air traffic control for any service, from REST to gRPC and L4 to L7,” said Augusto Marietti, CEO and co-founder of Kong. “We’ve seen significant production growth in the Kong ecosystem since we launched in 2015, and we’re proud to introduce the fully featured Kong 1.0 to the world today. API management is rapidly evolving with the industry, and technology must evolve with it. We built Kong from the ground up to meet these needs — Kong is the only API platform designed to manage and broker the demands that in-flight data increasingly place on modern software architectures.”

Thousands of organizations across all industries, including Yahoo! Japan, Ferrari, WeWork and Healthcare.gov, currently use Kong to better manage traffic for microservices, containers, cloud and serverless. “As Yahoo! Japan shifts to microservices, we needed more than just an API gateway – we needed a high-performance platform to manage all APIs across a modern architecture,” said Kanaderu Fukuda, senior manager of the Computing Platform Department at Yahoo! Japan. “With Kong as a single point for proxying and routing traffic across all of our API endpoints, we eliminated redundant code writing for authentication and authorization, saving hundreds of hours. Kong positions us well to take advantage of future innovations, and we’re excited to expand our use of Kong for service mesh deployments next.”