DEVOPSdigest

Kong announced Kong Konnect Dedicated Cloud Gateways, the simplest and most cost-effective way to run Kong Gateways in the cloud fully managed as a service and on enterprise dedicated infrastructure.

This infrastructure is exclusively reserved for each client, ensuring no shared resources with other customers. The distinction addresses the needs of large enterprises seeking heightened performance, security and control. Dedicated Cloud Gateways are available in Kong Konnect, Kong's unified cloud API platform.

Kong Konnect Dedicated Cloud Gateways simplify the process of adopting Kong Gateway whether organizations are running a single API in one region or handling trillions of requests from thousands of APIs across a globally distributed infrastructure, and across multiple cloud vendors. There are no servers to set up, configure or manage; no backups to schedule; and no need to set up monitoring. With support for secure private networking, dedicated infrastructure, multi-cloud and multi-region coverage, it caters to enterprise API requirements both for traffic at the edge and internally.

"At Kong, we enable any company to become an API-first company — speeding up time to market, creating new business opportunities and delivering superior products and services," said Marco Palladino, CTO and co-founder of Kong. "Dedicated Cloud Gateways make it even easier for businesses and builders to quickly harness the power of Kong Gateway, the world's most adopted API gateway. It's the best of both worlds: serverless-like usage that's 1-click for ease of use while running on fully dedicated multi-cloud and multi-region infrastructure that delivers the best performance and the lowest latency at all times. It truly is the easiest way to deploy modern API infrastructure."

Dedicated Cloud Gateways reduce concerns around scaling and downtime and minimize staffing and training needs. If a server goes down, the system takes care of it. If an API experiences a spike in traffic, the system scales the API gateways automatically with no downtime. In the event something can't be handled automatically, Kong's 24/7 response team springs into action — reducing the burden on internal teams. When there's a need to add more API capacity, run on more powerful hardware or add more microservices and APIs, it's just a few clicks and Kong Konnect takes care of the rest. Upgrades across different Kong Gateway versions are also 1-click and completely automated with no downtime.

Kong offers flexible solutions to manage Kong Gateways in any environment.

- With Dedicated Cloud Gateways in Kong Konnect, the control and data plane are fully hosted and managed by Kong. This comes with the benefit of no servers to set up, configure or manage and significantly less staffing for running global infrastructure at scale since the uptime of the infrastructure becomes Kong Konnect's responsibility.

- Dedicated Cloud Gateways support two modes of operation: "Autopilot" which elastically and autonomously scales the infrastructure either up or down, based on incoming traffic, without requiring any user input, across all clouds and regions. And a "Custom" mode that enables users to choose the exact size of the instances — and the number of instances in each region — providing enhanced predictability and control.

- Kong Konnect will continue to offer a hybrid mode where the control plane is managed by Kong and the data plane is managed by the customer in their preferred environment. This allows organizations to maintain control of their data. Dedicated Cloud Gateways fully integrates with every other Kong Konnect product, like API Analytics, Developer Portal and Service Hub.

- For those seeking a fully on-premises option, Kong Enterprise extends Kong Gateway with enterprise plugins, advanced security features, observability, GUIs and 24/7 support.

Dedicated Cloud Gateways are ideal for both enterprise and commercial customers that want to reduce the burden of running mission-critical API infrastructure, while at the same time benefiting from the same security and performance guarantees that they would have with traditional self-managed infrastructure, thanks to the native support for private networking and out-of-the-box global DNS routing across regions based on real-time performance metrics.

Dedicated Cloud Gateways are currently available as an invite-only technical preview for Amazon Web Services across US, EMEA and APAC regions and are scheduled to be launched for Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform in the upcoming months with the goal of supporting 30+ regions across all major public cloud vendors at GA.