Kong 1.0 Debuts Providing Open Source API Platform for Cloud Native Applications
In the world of modern enterprise applications, APIs are king, enabling organization to extend and integrate different capabilities rapidly. Among the companies trying to make it easier for organization to build and manage APIs is Kong, which officially launched its 1.0 release on Sept. 18.
Until October 2017, Kong was known as Mashape Inc. The company has raised a total of $26.1 million in funding, including an $18 million Series B in March 2017.
Kong's primary product is its eponymous API server, which first became open source in 2015. Kong also has an enterprise edition, which provides additional reporting and management features. The 1.0 release marks a maturity milestone for Kong, implying a degree of stability that organizations and developers will be able to rely upon.
“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.”
Features
Among the new enhancements that have landed in Kong 1.0 is a new Database Abstraction Object (DAO), which is all about making it easier for organizations to move from one version of Kong to another.
Kong 1.0 also adds support for service mesh approaches, which is one of the emerging trends in cloud native. Among the most talked about service mesh approaches is the Istio project, which provides a service mesh where networking capabilities for Kubernetes clusters can be offloaded.
“API management is rapidly evolving with the industry, and technology must evolve with it,” Marietti stated. “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.”
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at EnterpriseAppsToday and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.
Sean Michael is a writer who focuses on innovation and how science and technology intersect with industry, technology Wordpress, VMware Salesforce, And Application tech. TechCrunch Europas shortlisted her for the best tech journalist award. She enjoys finding stories that open people's eyes. She graduated from the University of California.
