DEVOPSdigest

Kong announced the commercial availability of Kong Konnect Dedicated Cloud Gateways on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Available exclusively via Kong Konnect, the company's unified API platform, this release represents a new standard in simplicity for deploying global, dedicated API management, combining zero downtime upgrades, one-click deployment and elastic scalability. Cloud Gateways offers users the ability to effortlessly establish a multi-cloud and multi-region distributed API management infrastructure, either at the edge or internally, with dedicated cloud resources. With support for private networking, which fortifies secure connections within the cloud, the platform delivers an unrivaled developer experience reminiscent of serverless environments — albeit on dedicated, customer-exclusive infrastructure.

"Today we're delivering the fastest API infrastructure, featuring one-click deployment that completely simplifies API management. It's a game changer," said Marco Palladino, CTO and Co-Founder of Kong Inc. "We've combined our renowned modern, performant and extensible API technology with the ease of use of automatic scaling and no-downtime upgrades, while also running on dedicated infrastructure for maximum performance and security with support for private networking and a multi-cloud vision. It's truly a unique offering in the whole industry that will enable our customers to experience a paradigm shift for product agility, operational velocity and cost efficiency."

At its core, the platform harnesses Kong Gateway, widely recognized as the most popular OSS API gateway. This integration allows seamless management of APIs with uniform performance and facilitates the use of Kong Gateway's extensive plugin library and custom plugins. Users can also take advantage of the complete suite of Kong Konnect's full lifecycle API management capabilities, including Gateway Manager, Mesh Manager, Service Hub, Developer Portal, and API Analytics, as well as Kong Konnect's suite of offerings for enabling federated governance at scale for modern platform teams.

Key highlights of Kong Konnect Dedicated Cloud Gateways include:

- Multi-cloud and multi-region deployment: Deploy API gateway infrastructure across various clouds and regions with a single click, while Kong Konnect streamlines provisioning, upgrading and scaling. With this launch, AWS is supported across nine regions, with more regions and cloud providers being announced in the coming months.

- For edge and internal APIs: For both external and internal API use cases, get fine-grained configuration and security on how the APIs should be accessed, whether running at the edge or internally.

- Autopilot mode: Get hands-free autoscaling deployments based on traffic to the API infrastructure, with built-in prewarming for zero downtime on the first request.

- Custom mode: For greater granularity and cost predictability, select specific resources and instance types for each region.

- Private networking with AWS Transit Gateway: Embrace the security of running API infrastructure as securely as if within your own account, with options to connect and integrate across different cloud environments.

- Smart global DNS: Efficiently connect to multiple clouds and regions, optimizing API request routing based on latency and real-time performance with a built-in globally distributed edge DNS and native multi-region failover.

- Seamless integration and upgrades: Simplify day-2 operations with no-downtime upgrades of the infrastructure, ensuring effortless migration and simplified operations.

- Dedicated infrastructure: Run with maximum performance and compartmentalization for your sensitive API infrastructure while leveraging the ease of use of a SaaS service.

- Mix-and-match cloud and hybrid deployments: Deploy both cloud gateways and hybrid gateways and mix-and-match with the exact same surface area (i.e., admin API) and governance capabilities allowing unprecedented architectural flexibility and agility for modern platform teams.

Initially, Cloud Gateways is available on AWS across nine regions. Expansion to support Microsoft Azure will be announced in the coming months, and Google Cloud expansion is anticipated to be available by the end of 2024. Users can now deploy multiple clusters on Kong Konnect Control Planes to meet diverse needs with assured scalability and flexibility.