Open source API platform Kong has launched as version 1.0. According to the company, this launch serves as the foundation of Kong’s vision of creating a service control platform that takes advantage of AI, machine learning, API security and other emerging technologies in order to broker and secure the flow of information between services.
Kong is already a highly used open source project with over 45 million downloads currently, and with the 1.0 release it is now feature-complete.
Kong 1.0 incorporates three years of learning from production experiences. According to the company, Kong 1.0 combines low latency, linear scalability, and flexibility with a vast feature set and support for server mesh patterns, Kubernetes Ingress controller, and has backward compatibility between versions.
Supporting service mesh allows Kong to be deployed to any instance to better broker information flow between services. In addition, users can tie directly to the Kubernetes lifecycle with the Kubernetes Ingress controller.
For increased scalability, as new applications and service are deployed, Kong automatically configures itself to serve traffic to those services. Finally, new migration functionality allows for easier migrations and no downtime when upgrading.
“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.”
