DEVOPSdigest

Mashape rebranded as Kong and articulated its vision to become the broker layer that empowers developers to lead the software industrial revolution. In addition, Kong also announced the general availability of its new enterprise platform, Kong Enterprise Edition.

Previously, Mashape solely referred to its open source API Gateway and microservices abstraction layer as Kong. This evolution reflects how the Kong community -- hundreds of thousands of individual open source users and Mashape Enterprise customers -- already refer to the company, the technology and the community itself as "Kong." The new official name and brand identity underscore Kong's mission: to broker information through APIs.

Kong's Microservices API Gateway is an extendable abstraction layer that securely manages communication between APIs and microservices, future proofing an enterprise's architectural choices and facilitating the development of next-generation, decentralized applications at scale.

Kong allows engineering teams to manage, analyze, secure and consume microservices APIs with ease, confidence and reliability that prior methods of API management cannot provide. As enterprises push the boundaries of AI-based applications and embrace a cloud-based, decentralized approach to application deployment, Kong's API Gateway streamlines the transition from the old way to the new way. Kong enables developers to fully embrace the future of eCommerce, IoT, autonomous vehicles and software-based technological advancements that have not yet even been imagined.

"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. "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."

Deployed in a centralized pattern or as a sidecar, Kong Enterprise Edition offers a lightweight, extensible and flexible abstraction layer that securely manages communication between microservices APIs to run cloud-native, decentralized applications. It provides an enterprise-hardened collection of advanced features that dramatically expands the capabilities of Kong Community Edition, including:

- Powerful Admin GUI: The control panel graphical user interface provides the ability to edit, add and delete APIs, Consumers and Kong plugins by providing a rich set of customizations that simplify admin tasks.

- Developer portal: A rich set of developer management features that provides interactive API documentation, flexible customization options and native support for the most popular spec formats, including Swagger/OpenAPI Spec.

- Enterprise-level scalability: Fast moving companies that need to scale microservices alongside overall business growth will find the scaling features of the Kong Enterprise edition a great boost to developer, proxy and admin performance. These include faster rate limiting, network optimization via edge caching, the ability to combine Regex variables and dynamic transformations for routing purposes and Redis HA Sentinel support for high availability.

- Security and RBAC features: Administrators now have access to advanced security and governance features, including role-based access control, self-service resource provisioning, that provide more control over access to individual microservices and nodes. The platform also supports a range of third party authentication plugins, including OpenID Connect and LDAP to protect against internal threats and unauthorized access.

- Analytics capabilities: The Kong Enterprise Edition includes real-time visualizations of traffic, performance and error requests made by individual APIs or end users and provides up-to-the-minute response logs and quota metering to ensure that users can review, report and respond to data trends filter-based alerts, inspection protocols and custom reporting capabilities that allow users to analyze and report data trends with second-to-second accuracy.

- Services and support: To ensure maximum uptime and long-term customer success, Kong Enterprise includes a 24/7, proactive customer success engineering team and support for mission-critical infrastructure deployments.