Mashape is making a bold statement by declaring the end of the monolithic application era and going all in with microservices. The company has decided to rebrand itself as a microservices API company under the name of Kong, Inc with a mission to broker information through APIs.
“Microservices are becoming the most important aspect of modern enterprise infrastructure and their connectivity and management will be a critical component for larger companies in the near future,” said Augusto Marietti, CEO of Kong.
Mashape originally started out with a marketplace where developers could buy and sell APIs. While the marketplace never turned into the big business Mashape had hoped for, it did turn into a huge developer community. In 2015, the company decided to open source the core technology, which became known as Kong. It was originally used to help secure, manage and extend microservices for the API marketplace. Today, the open-source technology acts as a microservice API gateway for enterprises. “It took off right away in the open-source community, and it was clear we were onto something, so we started selling enterprise support and adding more features,” said Marietti.
To build on the success of the technology, the company announced the general availability of its new enterprise platform along with the rebranding. Kong Enterprise Edition is a modern microservices API abstraction platform built for large organizations. It extends beyond the open-source platform with features such as a GUI for editing, adding and deleting APIs; a developer portal with API management features; enterprise-level scalability; security and role-based access control features; and analytics capabilities.
Kong Enterprise Edition will also help organizations decouple their legacy services as they transition into a modern microservices-based architecture. “We have a foot in the past and a foot in the future,” said Marietti. “We can help a legacy company start a journey from monolithic applications and move to microservices, and we can also help a company start a microservices architecture from scratch.” Marietti notes while monolithic applications are dying, it will still be another 10 to 20 years before Global 5000 companies completely stop using them.
“Adopting Kong Enterprise Edition future-proofs architectural choices, whether the business is still running on legacy and looking to adopt containers or even serverless deployments,” Marietti said.
