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Tag: Kong

  • Kong Enterprise 2.7 Simplifies API Management

    Kong Enterprise 2.7 Simplifies API Management

    Kong Inc. this week advanced its service connectivity platform strategy with an update to Kong Enterprise that makes it simpler to collectively manage groups of application programming interfaces (APIs).

    Michael Heap, director of developer experience for Kong, Inc., said that capability will make it simpler to, for example, assign rate limits to different tiers of APIs.

    In addition, Kong Enterprise version 2.7 adds support for real-time and event-based use cases involving the open source Kafka streaming platform and webhooks. Usage of event-driven architectures is rising as more organizations embrace digital business transformation initiatives that require near-real-time processing versus relying on traditional batch-oriented applications, noted Heap.

    Finally, IT teams can now also securely store secrets such as user names/passwords, API tokens, database credentials and private keys that might be used to access Kong Gateway. An improved user interface for Kong Manager UI makes it simpler to configure the Kong OpenID Connect (OIDC) Plugin for the Kong Gateway.

    Overall, Heap said, the latest update also provides 25% increased throughput and improved latency. In tests run by GigaOM, a third-party research firm, Kong Enterprise 2.7 achieved 52,250 transactions per second (TPS) maximum throughput with a 100% success rate.

    Kong is making a case for a service connectivity platform that enables an IT team to manage APIs at a higher level of abstraction by integrating all Layer 4 through Layer 7 services for both monolithic and microservices-based applications. Rather than having to manage an array of networking services and associated services in isolated silos, that layer of abstraction makes it simpler to manage distributed applications that have dependencies on a wide range of APIs.

    In general, the number of APIs that organizations are using both internally and externally has expanded tremendously over the last several years. The challenge now is finding a way to not only manage and secure all those APIs but also retire them as new services come online. Many APIs are created and simply forgotten about because their developer neglected to inform IT operations of their existence. Those so-called “zombie APIs” then become a cybersecurity liability when cybercriminals discover they can surreptitiously exfiltrate data via those APIs.

    APIs are, of course, an integral element of any software supply chain. But as high-profile security breaches put software supply chain security in the spotlight, it’s only a matter of time before IT teams look for more efficient ways to manage and secure APIs at scale.

    Inevitably, that also means organizations will need to decide how much they want to rely on proxy software, API gateways and service meshes to achieve that goal within the context of a larger service connectivity platform.

    In the meantime, the days when APIs were managed in isolation from the rest of the IT organization are coming to an end. The only thing left to determine is how involved API developers need to be in their ongoing life cycle management.

  • Kong Integrates Service Mesh with OPA

    Kong Integrates Service Mesh with OPA

    Kong, Inc. today announced an update to Kong Mesh, built on top of open source Kuma service mesh, that adds support for Open Policy Agent (OPA) software that enables DevOps teams to manage compliance as code.

    Kuma and OPA are both being developed under the auspices of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Kuma, unlike other service mesh offerings, provides connectivity across both microservices-based applications running on Kubernetes platform and monolithic applications deployed on virtual machines.

    In addition to adding support for OPA, the 1.2 release of Kong Mesh adds authentication mechanisms between the global and remote control planes operating across multiple zones. That functionality extends the Kuma Discovery Service (KDS) to support multiple authentication mechanisms.

    Finally, Kong has added support for the federal information processing standard (FIPS).

    Like the Istio service mesh, advanced by Google and IBM for Kubernetes environments, Kuma is based on open source Envoy proxy software. In contrast, however, Kuma is both lighter-weight and designed to span both cloud-native and legacy application environments.

    Marco Palladino, CTO at Kong, said OPA support will be a significant advance for both classes of workloads as organizations start to employ Kuma within the context of zero-trust computing environments. As DevSecOps processes are extended to include managing compliance as code, OPA will provide a programmable mechanism for ensuring that policies are not only properly implemented, but can also be easily audited, Palladino said.

    In general, an effort led by Kong, VMware and others to elevate the service mesh conversations to more broadly address application connectivity is underway. A service mesh, at its core, provides the means for integrating hundreds of application programming interfaces (APIs) at scale. It also provides a level of abstraction above the network layer that makes it easier to connect applications across a heterogeneous networking environment.

    Kong is making a case for a lighter-weight approach that spans multiple platforms and is highly extensible. As such, third-party vendors and IT teams can add extensions to Kuma as they see fit.

    Ultimately, Palladino said, the time has come to take cloud computing to the next level. If all organizations wind up doing is lifting and shifting monolithic applications to public clouds, an opportunity to advance the state of IT will have been lost.

    Of course, it’s still early days as far as adoption of service meshes are concerned. Most organizations today are relying on API gateways, proxy software or ingress controllers to manage APIs. It’s not clear to what degree a service mesh may remove the need for some of that existing application connectivity middleware.

    Regardless of which approach is ultimately favored, it’s apparent that, as microservices-based applications become more widely deployed, a different approach to application connectivity will be required. Monolithic applications, however, are not going away. In some cases, a monolithic application might be carved up into a smaller set of microservices, but it’s unlikely that every existing monolithic application will lend itself to that architecture any time soon.

  • The State of Digital Innovation, One Year Into the Pandemic

    The State of Digital Innovation, One Year Into the Pandemic

    It’s obvious COVID–19 accelerated digital reliance for many companies. And it’s no surprise that, according to a recent study, 89% of tech leaders believe digital experiences are critical to addressing new COVID–19 challenges. In this race toward 100% digital business, agile innovation is the new elixir of life — without it, a company may face an early retirement.

    Kong just released their 2021 Digital Innovation Benchmark, which summarizes the tech priorities of 400 IT leaders. The findings stress the importance of rapid digital innovation, open source, microservices architectures, and high quality practices for scaling today’s application ecosystems. Here are the key points technology leaders need to know to remain competitive.

    Innovate or Dissipate

    The urgency to innovate is increasing. According to the survey, 84% of respondents predict a business will go under within six years if they lag behind in digital innovation. Fifty one percent of tech leaders believe their business can only survive three years.

    If digital transformation happens too slowly, it can pose an existential threat. But there are many factors that can hinder faster digital innovation; the complexity of using multiple tech stacks, reliance on legacy IT and lack of automation. Not only are there internal woes, but external danger — 62% of respondents worry about failing to keep up with competitors who innovate faster.

    It seems the urgency has increased over the last year. In last year’s report, just 37% reported they’d be out of business in three years if they didn’t keep pace with digital innovation. That figure rose to a whopping 51% in 2021.

    COVID Amplifies Digital Drive

    Virtually no one is anticipating a decreased IT budget in light of COVID–19. On the contrary, long-term digital transformation efforts are well on target at the majority of institutions, and 75% expect to see an increase in IT/developer budgets over the next 12 months.

    Interestingly, when it comes to securing the digital-only economy, European tech may have a head start. Only 40% of European tech companies have increased their security focus, compared to 51% in the U.S. This could be due to previous investment in security and stricter regulation in European countries.

    In terms of cloud adoption, 40% of tech leaders feel COVID–19 has accelerated their move to the cloud. Nearly 40% say the pandemic has encouraged the use of microservices and cloud native architecture.

    Quality Outweighs Speed

    When gauging what matters most to tech leaders, “improving operational efficiency” is still a top priority. However, this year’s report saw a spike in respondents saying application performance and reliability, as well as application security, were moving up the priority list. Though 3 in 5 (62%) respondents said they are “extremely concerned” about competition from speedier rivals, application stability outweighs the collective drive to innovate.

    These trends are likely indicative of a notable rise in cybercrime. As I’ve covered previously, to respond to emerging threats, DevSecOps practices and new security tooling are shifting left within the development cycle, automating things like vulnerability detection. Simultaneously, roles to increase application integrity, like site reliability engineers, are in high demand.

    New Technologies and Open-Source Thrills

    As mentioned earlier, IT budgets are increasing across the board. When adopting new technologies, companies place the highest emphasis on the tech that increases efficiency. A surge in automation follows a low-code movement gaining steam. Companies consider the following key factors when introducing new tech: reducing deployment risk, increasing collaboration, and increasing development. Ninety five percent of US respondents also listed the “need to integrate with existing tools” as necessary — no surprise in today’s API-driven development landscape.

    Ninety one percent of organizations use open-source software in 2021 — this is up from 82.5% in 2020. Across the board, open-source is intrinsically embedded into most software projects. We see open-source especially used in open databases, infrastructure automation, API design and testing, CI/CD tools, Docker containers, Kubernetes and service mesh. Arguably, modern DevOps would not be possible without such open source initiatives.

    Bring it on, Microservices

    If you haven’t heard of microservices yet, we would be worried. An impressive 87% of survey participants believe that microservices-based applications are the future.

    While that sounds substantial, a path toward 100% distributed microservices architecture has not been mapped within most organizations. In 2021, only 33% of companies have transitioned entirely to a distributed architecture, whereas most (53.5%) adopt a hybrid mix of microservice and monolithic styles.

    “This is strong evidence that microservices have quickly become the de-facto approach for modern application architectures that enable digital innovation,” the report said. Though more development is required, a microservices-centric future seems obvious.

    Within organizations that have already adopted a microservices approach, the average number of microservices in production is 102. And those are primarily to increase security. Ironically, the report also found maintaining security to be the top challenge of deploying a microservices system. Other drivers for microservices adoption include integrating new tech, increasing development speed and boosting flexibility.

    Kubernetes Becomes Ubiquitous

    Kubernetes has clearly emerged as the industry standard orchestration platform. Eighty six percentof all respondents report they now use Kubernetes in production, or plan to within 12 months. This is a massive jump from VMWare’s 2020 report, which put Kubernetes use at 48%.

    However, there are challenges to implementing Kubernetes in practice. Companies cite security, complexity, performance and monitoring as top setbacks when introducing Kubernetes. To say Kubernetes has a steep learning curve may be an understatement, as abstraction layers are introduced to rectify a widening knowledge gap.

    Service Mesh Prickly for Early Installs

    Interestingly, API gateway adoption and container usage, according to the survey, are both 38%. Yet, service mesh adoption is only at 20%. This could underscore the fact that service mesh is still an emerging concept — service mesh experts say the tech isn’t ready for widespread adoption. Or, it could reflect that production use cases are rare (primarily for supporting vast microservices deployments).

    Early service mesh adopters see increased service connectivity and discovery as a top benefit of the technology. This seems logical, as service mesh aims to be a common networking framework. Other common benefits include cost reduction, meeting compliances, zero-trust security in networking and traffic observability.

    Naturally, service mesh isn’t without its thorns. Complexity in deployment and ensuring performance at scale top the list of challenges faced when deploying service mesh, slowing its adoption.

    Hybrid Multicloud

    The current status of multicloud deployment sees a mix of on-premises and multiple cloud providers, with 41% of organizations using multicloud deployment strategies. While cloud adoption rates are increasing, 31% of organizations are still running on-premises servers. The saturation of cloud tooling, and the market validity of Azure and Google Cloud Platform to take on AWS, have influenced a multicloud environment. Cloud expertise is now a hot commodity to navigate multicloud modalities — so much so that some companies have introduced a new role, The Other CFO, or Cloud Economist, to balance the cloud checkbook.

    Riding out the Virtual Wave

    The pandemic has accelerated the move toward digital experiences, and in turn, quickened the pace of enterprise technological evolution across the board. As COVID–19 effects continue, there’s no indication the virtual wave will recede anytime soon.

    To summarize the current state of digital innovation:

    • Rising digital tide: The pace to innovate is rising, and those left below the new-digital-normal water line will drown.
    • IT spend is up: Most companies have increased IT budgets moderately to support new digital norms.
    • Needs for adoption: Desires for automation, speed, security and integration rank high for adopting new tech.
    • Microservices on fire: The report describes “accelerated mainstreaming of microservices.” Microservices, and the tech that supports them, are clearly the future.
    • Kubernetes everywhere: As Kubernetes rises to ubiquity, last-mile efforts center on security and developer usability.
    • Bullish on service mesh: Service mesh sees early production uses, which will likely signal more growth in this area.

    There’s nothing unexpected in these findings; instead, they affirm what most of us already know — digital innovation is going full throttle. Check out the entire 2021 Digital Innovation Benchmark here.

  • Kong Brings Collaboration to Designing APIs

    Kong Brings Collaboration to Designing APIs

    Kong has launched an open source tool for designing application programming interfaces (APIs) designed to make it easier for teams of developers to collaboratively edit an API specification that can be stored in a Git repository.

    Based on the open source Insomnia API management platform the company gained last year by acquiring Floating Keyboard Software Inc., the Insomnia Designer tool for designing APIs integrates natively with the testing capabilities embedded in the Insomnia API management platform to make it easier to collaboratively design both REST and GraphQL services.

    As part of that effort, Kong is also releasing plugins that enable teams to automatically embed Kong Gateway policies directly into their API specification files within a Git repository.

    Greg Schier, technology tech lead for Insomnia at Kong, said the goal is to streamline the workflow for designing APIs by enabling teams to share updates to edits of API specifications using best GitOps processes.

    For example, DevOps teams can now search for API designs to discover details such as Git Status and Git Branch. They also can automatically generate configurations for both Kubernetes and Kong for Kubernetes within the individual API spec file. Developers can also select Kong plugins that provide capabilities such as authentication or rate-limiting to govern their API’s behavior.

    As organizations embrace microservices-based applications the need to be able to design, build, deploy and maintain APIs has become more critical. Each microservice within an application exposes its own APIs. Organizations that embrace microservices soon find they need to potentially build thousands of APIs. Rather than address each of those API as an isolated project, Kong is making the case for constructing a set of workflows that make it easier to design and construct APIs within the context of a larger DevOps process.

    The goal should be to eventually make the testing of APIs a natural extension of the unit testing process embedded within a continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform, said Schier.

    Within far too many organizations the designing and building of APIs is still an afterthought. There is naturally a lot of focus on building microservices, but once they are constructed not nearly as much attention is paid to the API. And yet, while microservices frequently are replaced, it is the API that remains constant. All the dependencies between the microservices that make up an application are only manageable because of the APIs employed to connect them all. Rather than constructing APIs after a microservice is built, Kong is making the case for consistently designing and building APIs in keeping with best DevOps practices.

    In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s hard to say at what rate organizations will be building and deploying new applications. What is for certain is the bulk of new applications will be based on cloud-native microservices to make them more flexible and resilient. That way when the next major crisis erupts, organizations will be able to respond more adroitly to rapidly changing business conditions because the enterprise architecture now revolves around APIs.

  • Kong Inc. Open Sources Insomnia Designer – a Collaborative Design Editor for APIs

    Kong Inc. Brings the Insomnia Community New Software to Accelerate the Creation of High-Performing, Stable APIs, While Fueling Innovation of Kong Studio

    SAN FRANCISCO, April 29, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — Kong Inc., the leading cloud connectivity company, today announced the release of a new open source tool called Insomnia Designer. Building on Insomnia Core, which Kong acquired in 2019, Insomnia Designer provides a collaborative API design editor that makes it easier for developers and DevOps teams to create and edit API specifications. The software works natively with Insomnia’s testing capabilities to accelerate the development, performance and stability of REST and GraphQL services, the communications backbone of the modern applications and services people rely on each day. Insomnia Designer is available now at https://insomnia.rest/download or can be downloaded by Kong Enterprise customers as part of Kong Studio.

    “With Insomnia Designer, we’re building on Insomnia’s open source foundation to provide a single, collaborative workflow for teams to design APIs,” said Greg Schier, tech lead at Kong Inc. and creator of Insomnia. “Insomnia is the most popular open source tool for exploring and debugging GraphQL and REST APIs, and we’re looking to have Insomnia Designer follow the same principles.”

    The need for stable, high-performing APIs has never been greater. With digital transformation initiatives in full swing at companies of all sizes and industries, applications are becoming increasingly distributed. Market research shows that the vast majority of companies (84 percent) are already using microservices, and a growing number have moved entirely to distributed architectures. Functioning as the nerve endings connecting decentralized applications and systems, APIs enable and govern how microservices communicate and exchange information. Insomnia Designer makes it simple to design APIs and use them across different repositories.

    “In the new era of API-driven applications and architectures, the importance of clean and extensible API design is essential to enable both API consumption and API innovation, and it has long been our goal at Kong to provide open source tools for designing APIs and microservices at scale,” said Marco Palladino, CTO and co-founder of Kong Inc. “We are thrilled to share Insomnia Designer with our community.”

    Insomnia Designer: Wakes Up API Design for All Types of Application Interfaces

    Unlike other API design tools that enforce one-size-fits-all processes, Insomnia Designer brings a spec-first development approach that allows users to create workflows that mirror the way their teams communicate to foster better collaboration. The new Insomnia Designer empowers developers to more easily design REST and GraphQL APIs by using Git repository as a single source of truth. By enabling GitOps best practices, Insomnia Designer facilitates collaboration, increases release velocity, and allows developers to track changes from multiple people and ensure code is up to standards through pull request reviews.

    To expand on the GitOps capabilities offered within Insomnia Designer, Kong is also releasing plugins that enable Insomnia Designer users to automatically embed Kong Gateway policies directly into their API specification files. In line with GitOps best practices, this allows all configurations for the Kong Gateway and API to be stored in the same Git repository. Within the Insomnia Designer UI, users can select Kong Plugins for capabilities such as authentication or rate-limiting to govern their API’s behavior, and input it directly into their code.

    Key features include:

    • Provides a single, collaborative space for developer teams to browse, explore and collaborate on API specs for both REST and GraphQL endpoints
    • Automatically generates configurations for both Kubernetes and Kong for Kubernetes within the individual API spec file
    • Allows users to easily search for API design and view critical details, including Git Status, Git Branch and more via the Insomnia Document Listing
    • Increases the automation of developer workflows via plugin integrations with Kong Gateway and the Kong Enterprise platform
    • Includes all features in Insomnia Core within an UI/UX optimized for API design workflows

    Availability

    Download open source Insomnia Designer at: https://insomnia.rest/download

    Resources

    About Kong Inc.

    Kong creates software that connects APIs and microservices natively across and within clouds, Kubernetes, data centers and more using intelligent automation. Built on an open source core, Kong’s solutions enable digital innovation by allowing organizations to reliably and securely manage the full lifecycle of APIs and services for modern architectures including microservices, serverless and service mesh. By providing developer teams with unprecedented architectural freedom, Kong accelerates innovation cycles, increases productivity, and seamlessly bridges legacy and modern systems and applications. For more information about Kong, please visit konghq.com or follow @thekonginc on Twitter.

  • Survey Sees Massive Adoption of Microservices

    Survey Sees Massive Adoption of Microservices

    Under increasing pressure to innovate faster, a majority (84%) of organizations taking part in a recent survey have already embraced microservices.

    The survey, conducted by Vanson Bourne on behalf of API management platform provider Kong, polled 200 senior IT leaders in organizations with more than 1,000 employees. Among the results, 89% of technology leaders agree that companies that are not able to effectively support microservices will be less able to compete in the future.

    The report also finds on average organizations are running 184 microservices, with 60% of respondents running 50 or more. The primary reasons cited for adopting microservices are improvements to security (56%), increased development speed (55%), increased speed of integrating new technologies (53%), improved infrastructure flexibility (53%) and improved collaboration across teams (46%).

    Kong CTO Marco Palladino said the report makes it clear that just about every organization is on a journey to making a transition to microservices as part of an effort to reduce reliance on inflexible monolithic applications. Initially, that transition involves lifting and shifting monolithic applications in the cloud before decoupling functions using microservices, he said.

    As part of that journey, Palladino noted, the survey also finds significant microservices challenges remain, including ensuring security (36%), integration with legacy applications (32%), the complexity of management (31%) and updating API documentation (31%).

    Despite these concerns, however, more than 80% of survey respondents who have adopted microservices report that their organization performs well against metrics for development efficiency, the ability to use new platforms, collaboration across teams and sharing of services across applications.

    Overall, a full 90% of respondents said securely connecting applications and ensuring performance at scale collectively represent one of the greatest technical challenges of the 21st century. Also, 71% said they believe that organizations would be out of business within six years if they fail to keep pace with innovation in their industry. For public companies, the urgency is even greater, with 39% reporting they believe organizations will be out of business in less than three years if they fail to keep pace with innovation. Overall, 57% of technology leaders feel organizations are concerned that they are at risk of competitive displacement.

    Pressure on IT leaders is high as a result. Nearly three-quarters of respondents (74%) agree that a failed digital transformation effort will result in a missed promotion, lost bonus or even termination. The report identifies the top three priorities for IT leaders as improving efficiency (47%), reducing cost (41%) and increasing security (40%).

    Technology leaders, however, continue to place the highest importance on the availability (75%), security (74%), performance (65%) and scalability (64%). At the same time, technology leaders are focused on faster development speeds (95%), increased collaboration (94%) and reduced deployment risks (93%) as key desired outcomes for adopting any new technologies.

    The challenges most cited in terms of achieving those agility goals are the complexity of using multiple technologies (35%), lack of automation (32%) and reliance on legacy technologies (29%).

    The survey also notes 83% of organizations are relying on open source software to become more agile. The most commonly used open source technologies are databases (64%), containers (48%), API gateways (41%), infrastructure automation (40%), container orchestration (37%) and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) tools (36%).

    In terms of cloud adoption, Microsoft Azure (43%) narrowly beat Amazon Web Services (AWS) (42%), with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) coming in third at 27%.

    On the plus side, 78% of respondents said their organizations are increasing IT budgets in the coming year, with 27% of public companies expecting their budgets to grow 26% or more. Nearly 90% of companies will also be increasing headcount, with 56% hiring internally and 31% relying on more freelancers and/or outsourcing to meet hiring goals.

    Hopefully, with that increased funding more organizations will be able to strike that elusive balance between stability and innovation.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Kong Employs Machine Learning to Extend Services Control

    Kong Employs Machine Learning to Extend Services Control

    At the Kong Summit 2019 conference, Kong today announced it has acquired Insomnia, an open source testing tool for application programming interfaces (APIs). In addition, it has added support for REST, Kafka Streams, gRPC, GraphQL and plugins written in Go to its service control platform.

    Kong also added more capabilities based on machine learning algorithms in the form of a visual service map a Kong Immunity module that detects anomalies across services spanning multiple platforms.

    Additionally, the company is delivering Kong Studio, a suite of tools to design, build and maintain APIs for REST and GraphQL endpoints based on the API testing and debugging tool Insomnia, which then can be published to Kong Gateway, proxy software for deploying and managing distributed APIs. The 2.0 release of Kong Gateway separates the data and control plane for the platform and provides the ability to write plugins in Go via Kong’s Plugin Development Kit.

    Kong CTO Marco Palladino said collectively, this approach makes it easier to address a raft of potential API issues at design time rather than after an API has been pushed into a production environment.

    Finally, Kong also updated Kuma, an open source control plane for a service mesh based on Envoy proxy software developed under the auspices of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

    Kong has been making the case for a service control plane dubbed Kong Brain, which spans both cloud-native and legacy monolithic environments and makes extensive use of machine learning algorithms. Palladino said as more services proliferate across existing monolithic and cloud-native application environments, there is no way IT organizations will be able to keep pace without relying more on machine learning algorithms to manage events and processes occurring within milliseconds of one another across the much more complex IT environment.

    In fact, Palladino noted that rather than expecting one environment to supplant the other, IT organizations should expect to see services proliferate across both monolithic and cloud-native application environments. Managing all those different classes of services will require a service control platform capable of spanning multiple environments, he said.

    Over time, machine learning algorithms will enable service control platforms to become smarter as IT environments transition to managing services end to end versus continuing to focus on individual applications. Naturally, there’s a high correlation between organizations that have made that transition and those that have embraced DevOps to build, deploy and manage those services, said Palladino, noting the most successful organizations employ DevOps to deploy and update APIs as if they were a standalone application rather than a set of add-on capabilities that tend to be forgotten over time.

    It remains to be seen how the confluence of APIs and DevOps ultimately will change how IT is managed. The only thing that is for certain is the days when applications were managed in isolation are finally coming to a much-needed close.

    — Mike Vizard