The latest updates to Kong Konnect help companies further prepare their API infrastructure to handle AI use cases.

“There is no AI without APIs, and the latest version of Kong Konnect delivers the essential infrastructure for both. We aim to give businesses the tools to manage and scale their API traffic securely, helping drive innovation faster than ever before,” said Augusto Marietti, CEO and co-founder of Kong Inc. “Kong Konnect provides a unified API platform for building, running and governing GenAI applications.”

This update includes Konnect Service Catalog, which provides a single source of truth for APIs and services, which helps companies manage shadow APIs by allowing them to get rid of undiscovered or unused APIs. The Service Catalog also features a Scorecard that assesses how compliance a service is with defined criteria. 

Konnect Dedicated Cloud Gateways are also now available on Azure and new AWS regions. According to the company, this added availability enables organizations to deploy and manage their APIs across multiple clouds and maintain enterprise-grade SLAs. 

Kong Insomnia 10, which is an API design and testing tool, adds unlimited collection runs, AI Runner for developing GenAI apps, and Invite Control, which ensures that API assets can only be accessed by authorized users.

Other features in this release of Kong Konnect include Serverless Gateways, a centralized and cloud-based repository for managing API configurations, and advanced API and AI analytics. 

The update also introduces versions 3.8 of both Kong Gateway and Kong AI Gateway. Kong Gateway 3.8 adds Incremental Configuration Updates, which significantly reduces memory and CPU usage, and enhanced OpenTelemetry support. 

Kong AI Gateway 3.8 adds several semantic reasoning capabilities, including Semantic Caching, which recognizes when different prompts represent the same question, resulting in faster response times. For instance, “how long does it take to cook pasta?” and “how long does it take to cook spaghetti?” would be responded to with the same cached response. 

According to the company, the ability to reply with cached responses cuts down on processing times and reduces computational overhead.

Another new feature in this update is Semantic Prompt Guard, which enables AI Gateway to understand the “essence” of a request and block inappropriate prompts. Normally, those prompts are sorted out by identifying specific keywords, and this feature eliminates the need for that. 

The 3.8 release also introduces Semantic Routing, which selects the most relevant LLM based on a developer’s requirements.

“Kong AI Gateway 3.8 is a significant step forward in enabling organizations to fully harness the power of AI,” said Marco Palladino, co-founder and CTO of Kong. “By introducing Semantic Intelligence into our AI Gateway, we are addressing the most pressing challenges faced by enterprises leveraging GenAI today — speed, cost and security — while dramatically improving the developer experience.”

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According to Kong, the goal of this release is to enhance developer productivity by simplifying the integration process of LLMs into various products. It ensures a secure, compliant, and controllable environment for AI requests within organizations.

“Today marks a significant milestone in our journey towards democratizing AI for developers and enterprises worldwide. By open-sourcing this suite of innovative AI capabilities, including no-code AI plugins, we’re removing the barriers to AI adoption and making it possible for developers to leverage multiple LLMs effortlessly and ship AI-powered applications faster. At the same time, we’re providing governance and visibility to all the AI traffic that is being generated by an organization,“ said Marco Palladino, CTO and co-founder of Kong Inc. 

Kong’s introduction of AI capabilities into its Kong Gateway via the “ai-proxy” plugin enables the incorporation of multiple LLMs, such as those offered by OpenAI, Azure AI, and others, providing a unified interface that allows developers to switch between models without altering their application code. It also simplifies the management of AI credentials by centralizing them within the Kong Gateway. This approach enhances security by abstracting credential management away from applications, enabling easier credential rotation and updates, according to Kong.

The “ai-proxy” plugin extends its functionality into the realm of analytics by enabling the collection of detailed Layer 7 AI metrics,which includes tracking request and response token counts, and usage data across different LLM providers and models. With support for integration with analytics platforms like Datadog and New Relic, alongside Kong Gateway’s native logging plugins, developers gain valuable insights into the usage patterns of their AI integrations. 

Additionally, the introduction of no-code AI integration plugins, mostly the “ai-request-transformer” and “ai-response-transformer,” empower users to inject AI capabilities directly into API requests and responses, enabling functionalities like real-time API response translation for broader internationalization efforts without the need for coding.

Kong also introduced plugins that specialize in the creation, decoration, and governance of AI prompts. The “ai-prompt-template” plugin allows for the centralized management of prompt templates, enabling swift updates and compliance with approved templates without needing to modify application code. The “ai-prompt-decorator” and “ai-prompt-guard” plugins provide mechanisms for ensuring that AI prompts are both consistent with organizational policies and protected against unauthorized or sensitive content.

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The new service, Dedicated Cloud Gateways, is a part of Kong Konnect, the company’s API management platform. “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 makes it even easier for businesses and builders to quickly harness the power of Kong Gateway, the world’s most adopted API gateway. It is the best of both worlds: serverless-like usage that is 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.”

According to Kong, there are no servers to set up, configure, or manage. It also can handle scaling up or down, based on traffic needs. The underlying infrastructure is reserved for each customer, so customers are never needing to share resources with each other. 

Customers can opt for one of two modes of operation. The first is Autopilot mode, where Kong automatically scales infrastructure up or down. The second option is Custom, which allows customers to choose the size of the instances, which can provide greater predictability and control. 

In addition to Dedicated Cloud Gateways, the company also announced the release of Kong Insomnia 8.0, which is an API development tool. 

This release adds Insomnia AI, which uses generative AI to generate tests. According to Kong, the new AI feature can improve developer productivity by 30%. 

Other new features include support for Enterprise Single Sign On and Role-Based Access Control, support for the Server-Sent Events API protocol, and the ability to see in real-time who is collaborating on a resource. 

“With the introduction of Insomnia AI in Kong Insomnia 8.0, we are reshaping the landscape of API development tools and the market itself. This release marks a major step forward in our mission to simplify the lives of developers, making it easier and more efficient for teams to design, test and collaborate on APIs,” said Palladino.

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Among these updates are major new releases of Kong Gateway, Kong Konnect, Kong Mesh, Kong Insomnia, and Kong Ingress Controller, and multiple new projects from the Kong Incubator. 

According to the company, it has also strengthened its partner ecosystem through deeper partnerships with companies such as Red Hat and AWS.

“APIs are no longer the simple building blocks of yesterday; they’re becoming the smart neural network of today’s cloud,” said Augusto Marietti, CEO and co-founder of Kong Inc. “Organizations of the future are software-enabled, data-driven and secure from cyberattacks – and APIs are the common language to achieve all three. To accomplish this, businesses need an effective API-first strategy to build a ‘cloud nervous system.’ That’s where Kong comes in with our end-to-end API platform.”

With these new product releases, users gain higher performance, increased flexibility, and stronger security.

These enhancements are intended to help businesses modernize their API strategies in order to deliver improved customer experiences.

 “Kong’s product strategy is very much in line with what I’m hearing from enterprise organizations and what they are looking for from their vendors,” said Paul Nashawaty, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. “Buyers want to know they can trust their vendors to provide features that are easy to implement. These new product feature updates and releases from Kong provide capabilities allowing developer teams to solve problems and think of innovative solutions across every environment, platform, deployment pattern and protocol – all with the peace of mind that there are guardrails to stop them from heading in the wrong direction.”

To learn more, follow the conversation live on Twitter under the hashtag #KongSummit22.

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Kong Enterprise is a service connectivity platform that enables organizations to secure, connect and orchestrate their APIs and services across cloud native, hybrid and on-premise environments. 

The new version achieved 52,250 transactions per second (TPS) maximum throughput with a 100% success rate (up from 40,625 TPS in 2021), performing 2,886% faster than Apigee X, which achieved 1,750 TPS maximum throughput with 100% success, according to Kong. 

Additional features include the ability to bulk-apply policies to APIs and developers automatically, an OpenID Connect Configuration wizard for faster authentication setup, and 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 Reza Shafii, the VP of product at Kong. “Kong Enterprise 2.7 is an important step toward Kong’s vision of powering the world’s digital connections through next-generation solutions that drive businesses forward.”

Kong has also started a partnership with enterprise Kubernetes management provider D2iQ. 

“By combining D2iQ’s Kubernetes management across hybrid multi-cloud clusters with the Kong service connectivity platform’s ability to dynamically discover services, enterprises will accelerate the delivery of modern solutions. The joint solution is built on an open architecture that will aid customers as they transition from monolithic to service-based applications,” said Kristian Györkös, VP of alliances at Kong.

The partnership provides organizations with a seamless, secure, and automated approach to deploying services-based applications across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

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The investment comes on the heels of Deloitte’s 2021 Technology Fast 500, which highlighted LogDNA’s 1293% revenue growth from 2017 to 2020. This influx of financing will allow LogDNA to accelerate time to market for a new observability data pipeline solution that will enable enterprises to ingest all of their data into a single platform, normalize it, and route it to the correct teams. 

Microsoft introduces new Azure SDK for Go

Microsoft recently unveiled the latest set of Azure SDK modules for Go that are currently in beta. These modules follow the Azure SDK Guidelines to provide an improved developer experience and they are grouped into management and client modules. 

The management module allows the user to manage resources in their Azure subscription, by creating and managing instances of Azure services. The client module allows users to use the capabilities exposed by instances of a service. The client modules include Azure Core, Identity, Tables, Key Vault, Secrets, Blob Storage, Cosmos DB, and Service Bus.

Support has been added for Advisor, Alerts Management, Analysis Services, App Platform, and more since Microsoft’s September announcement of management modules for Go. Users can get the latest modules using pkg.go.dev or view the latest source code in the Azure SDK for go repository. 

NeoSec unveiled integration with Kong

NeoSec, the company discovering and protecting APIs using behavioral analytics, today announced that it has formed a partnership with Kong Inc. in order to integrate its API security platform with Kong Gateway to provide a complete enterprise-class solution for managing and securing APIs and microservices. 

An integration with NecSec enables Kong users to gain enterprise API security capabilities to protect their critical business processes. This technology integration is the first API security solution with closed loop feedback into an API gateway. 

Giora Engel, chief executive officer at NeoSec said, “Our strategic partnership with Kong enables the platforms to natively work together using their existing Kong Gateway Enterprise deployment without requiring any changes to the production pipeline.”

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The Kuma 1.0 release includes several capabilities that help with multi-zone deployments, such as auto generation of “Zone” resources, locality aware load-balancing, and automatic synchronization of ingress data plane proxies to global CP.

Related Content: Kong open sources universal service mesh Kuma

This release adds support for explicit external services, support for a new “Service” resource that groups multiple data plane proxies, and support for the Kafka protocol. 

Performance improvements include better internal caching of resources, improved overall scalability of the CLI and GUI when running with a large amount of resources, and significant performance improvements when running tens of thousands of services. 

Key security features in Kuma 1.0 are a new flow for securing data plane proxies, a new flow for starting data plane proxies and connecting them to the control plane, added support for Kubernetes probes, and improved readiness checks for sidecar proxy. 

Other features include a new GUI, over 30 new charts in Grafana, support for AWS ECS and Fargate deployments, and support for Envoy 1.16.0. 

A full list of features is available in the project’s release notes.

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The company will continue to support Insomnia as an independent open-source project. With the acquisition, Kong said it looks to expand its portfolio of open-source technologies and to further its new Kong Studio, an integrated service design and collaboration suite. Kong Studio provides tools to help developers design, build and maintain APIs for REST and GraphQL endpoints. It also allows users to edit spec files, generate mock endpoints with Mockbin, and publish directly into the Kong Gateway, Registry and Developer Portal.

“Last year, we debuted our vision for an intelligent service control platform for connecting, managing and optimizing services in production, and we’re excited to expand that vision to include how services are designed, tested and distributed among increasingly decentralized workloads,” said Augusto Marietti, CEO and co-founder of Kong Inc. “With today’s news, we are providing developers the freedom to test and build in the best way possible, while also providing management teams with the tools to ensure efficiency and governance.”

The latest Kong Enterprise release also adds multi-protocol support for frictionless communication across REST, gRPC, GraphQL and Kafka services, as well as enhanced machine learning add-ons.

Kong also announced new open-source releases of Kong Gateway 2.0, which helps developers to write plugins in Go using its Plugin Development Kit, and the Kuma universal service mesh project, improving its performance and stability.

Kong said its goal is to make it possible for organizations to use the latest tools without disrupting the existing architecture by “bridging the gap between legacy and new cloud-native environments.”

More details on Kong’s integration of Insomnia and its new product capabilities is available here.

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The problem that early adopters had with the service mesh was that the first generation meshes lacked a mature control plane and required extensive manual work and was often built on “immature proprietary networking libraries, according to Kong in a post. 

Kuma is built to run on any platform, tackle complexity, and automate the process of securing underlying networks without having to change any code. 

“We now have more microservices talking to each other, and connectivity between them is the most unreliable piece: prone to failures, insecure and hard to observe,” said Marco Palladino, CTO and co-founder of Kong. “It was important for us to make Kuma very easy to get started with on both Kubernetes and VM environments, so developers can start using service mesh immediately even if their organization hasn’t fully moved to Kubernetes yet, providing a smooth path to containerized applications and to Kubernetes itself”

Kuma is built on an Envoy-based service mesh, which utilizes the Envoy proxy sidecar. 

According to Kong, control plane service meshes have shifted toward leveraging sidecar proxies with competitors such as Linkerd merged with Conduit and the original sidecar control plane mesh Istio in the ring. Sidecar proxies have been most commonly used in control service mesh architectures because they filter all network traffic from an individual service.

“It’s been amazing to see how quickly Envoy has been adopted by the tech community, and I’m super excited by Kong’s new ‘Kuma’ project,” said Matt Klein, creator of the Envoy proxy. “Kuma brings Kong’s proven enterprise developer focus to an Envoy-based service mesh, which will make it faster and easier for companies to create and manage cloud native applications.”

The key features of Kuma include:

• Software-Defined Security – enables mTLS for all L4 traffic. 
• Powerful Productivity Capabilities – enables users to quickly implement tracing and logging, allowing them to better analyze metrics for rapid debugging.
• Sophisticated Routing & Control – provides fine-grained traffic control capabilities such as circuit breakers and health checks to enhance L4 routing.

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“Four months ago, we declared that API Management is dead and announced our vision for a service control platform. Today, we’re taking a critical step towards fulfilling that vision,” Mike Bilodeau, from Kong’s product marketing team, wrote in a blog post. “As your organization increasingly adopts microservices, you will inevitably face new challenges in maintaining visibility, security and governance at scale. Kong Brain and Kong Immunity leverage artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) to improve visibility, security and efficiency across your entire development lifecycle.”

According to the company, automating processes such as documentation, configuration, and traffic analysis enables organizations to improve efficiency, accuracy, and security.

Kong Brain focuses on improving governance, efficiency and visibility with intelligent automation for API documentation by collecting data from the existing platform and generating documentation from that data. The documentation is then pushed back to Kong’s platform and autoconfigured. Kong Brain also enables users to easily map their services and endpoints, the company explained. Other abilities include the auto configuration of Kong Enterprise deployments, auto-generation of documentation,autonomous documentation updating, and the ability to generate a visual map of services.

Kong Immunity uses machine learning to analyze traffic patterns and detect anomalies, which the user will then be alerted of. The solution aims to give users more visibility into traffic behavior, allows them to quickly diagnose issues, and improve security by addressing threats before they occur. It can create a baseline for healthy traffic, and autonomously identify, analyze and address anomalies,

“With Kong Brain and Kong Immunity, we’re reinventing the software industry as we know it today and paving a new path for AI-powered service development and lifecycle management,” said Augusto Marietti, CEO and co-founder of Kong Inc. “By integrating AI and machine learning technology to automate the full API and service development lifecycle, we’re taking the first steps to building a nervous system for the cloud as we drive towards our vision of delivering a powerful service control platform that intelligently brokers information across all of an organization’s services. This is where the future of API management is heading.”

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