Kong climbs higher into cloud API canopy
Herbivorous predominantly ground-dwelling (originally equatorial-African) cloud connectivity company Kong these days resides in its now less than tropical San Francisco headquarters.
Keen to remain king (or queen) of the jungle, the company’s new Kong Enterprise 2.7 is now released as a service connectivity platform to manage APIs and microservices at scale across any underlying architecture.
This latest release features faster performance, including 25% increased throughput (capacity) and improved latency (speed) over already highly performant previous versions, as benchmarked by GigaOm.
According to a Kong press statement, this technology sports a faster core runtime and Kong Enterprise 2.7 has achieved 52,250 transactions per second (TPS) maximum throughput with a 100% success rate (up from 40,625 TPS in 2021).
That (again, according to Kong) means its platform is performing 2,886% faster than Apigee X, which achieved 1,750 TPS maximum throughput with 100% success.
The new release also introduces enhanced capabilities to improve security, streamline workflows and expand support for event-based and real-time architectures.
“Every millisecond of latency reduces conversion rates, which can translate into a significant drop in sales. Reduced API latency leads to faster overall application performance, allowing companies to deliver a superior customer experience while reducing costs and maximising revenue potential,” said Reza Shafii, VP of product at Kong Inc.
Open source, microservice-driven
Built on Kong’s core open source technology and designed for the modern era of software development, Kong Enterprise is said to secure, connect and orchestrate APIs and services across cloud native, hybrid and on-premise environments. The platform enables developer teams to manage millions of API calls and create scalable, microservice-driven applications.
Wikimedia free image: Silverback gorilla, not currently working at Kong, but open to offers for the right sysadmin role.
Kong Enterprise 2.7 offers a range of new enhancements in addition to faster performance, including simplified management capabilities, security improvements, and streamlined workflows to maximise APIOps and increase developer productivity.
The Department of Work and Pensions (DWP), the UK government’s biggest public service department, adopted Kong Enterprise in 2020 to scale data access and process automation to meet the unprecedented demand for their claims services as the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown began.
According to Jacqui Leggetter, integration lead for DWP Digital, “The Kong API gateway and Kong Enterprise hosted in our hybrid cloud infrastructure are supporting over 250 million real-time API calls per month and growing. Kong is key to our ongoing ambitious transformation plans and sits at the heart of our secure data sharing ecosystem across DWP and wider government.”
Enhancements
Notable additional features and enhancements include:
- Ability to bulk-apply policies to APIs and developers automatically
- OpenID Connect Configuration wizard for faster authentication setup
- Support for new real-time and event-based use cases with Kafka and webhooks
“Kong is focused on delivering the technology innovations that matter to our customers – and that means API connectivity solutions that are highly performant, offer better security and more automation, and provide the ability for customers to work seamlessly across platforms and software architectures,” said Shafii.
For more, read the Kong Enterprise 2.7 blog post.