Service mesh is redefining the way we think about security, reliability, and observability when it comes to service-to-service communication. In a previous blog post about service mesh, we took a deep dive into our definition of this new pattern for inter-service communication. Today, we’re going to take you through how to use Istio, an open source cloud native service mesh for connecting and securing east-west traffic.

Today, we are excited to announce the release of Kong 1.3! Our engineering team and awesome community has contributed numerous features and improvements to this release. Based on the success of the 1.2 release, Kong 1.3 is the first version of Kong that natively supports gRPC proxying, upstream mutual TLS authentication, along with a bunch of new features and performance improvements.

This is part three in a series discussing the metrics pipeline powering Kong Cloud. In previous posts in this series, we’ve discussed how Kong Cloud collects, ships, and stores high volumes of metrics and time-series data. We’ve described the difference between push and pull models of collecting metrics data, and looked at the benefits and drawbacks of each from a manageability and performance perspective.

When a data breach occurs involving a cloud service, the impulsive reaction is to denounce using the cloud (at least for sensitive information). Since cloud security is not widely understood, it may be difficult to delineate it in the context of more general information security.

In the current microservices DevOps environment, there are tough new and evolving challenges for developers and teams to consider on top of the more traditional ones. From worsening versions of already common threats to new-generation evolving threats, new perspectives are required on securing microservices. These new perspectives may not be intuitive for many otherwise sophisticated DevOps and data teams.

As we continue to expand across new industries and regions, we’re excited to share Cargill’s digital transformation story and how it turned to Kong Enterprise to create a unified API platform across existing legacy and newer cloud native systems. We talked to Jason Walker, senior enterprise architect at Cargill, about their journey to microservices. What was the driver for Cargill’s move to microservices?

The UK continues to be a growing hotbed for tech innovation. At Kong, we’re seeing fast adoption for our Kong Enterprise platform in the UK from organizations across a wide range of industries, including e-commerce, financial services, on-demand services and travel/hospitality, among many.

This year has been momentous in Kong’s journey as we have tripled in size, outgrown multiple offices and announced a successful Series C round. Today, we celebrate yet another huge milestone with the news that Forbes has included us in their annual list of Next-Billion Dollar companies. We are honored to receive such recognition and to be on the same list as 24 other ground-breaking companies that I can imagine are as elated as we are right now.

As we grow our footprint globally, we’re gaining strong momentum in the UK. We recently added several fast-growing, London-based organizations to the Kong Enterprise community. These organizations are turning to Kong to help power their core business applications and accelerate application development as they shift to microservices-driven architectures.

Today, we’re excited to unveil the latest release of our flagship open source offering – Kong 1.2! In this release, we’ve made key latency and throughput performance improvements and open sourced some previously enterprise-only plugins to enhance your overall Kong experience.