Today, we’re excited to announce a new research project we’ve been kicking around at Kong: Kong Embedded! If you’ve used the Kong Gateway before or heard us talk about it, one of the things we’re very proud of is that Kong Gateway uses a very small resource footprint. It’s a small download in size, is blazingly fast on even constrained hardware, and uses very little memory.
We are proud today to announce the future of service connectivity – Kong Konnect! Kong Konnect is the only full stack connectivity platform that is designed from the ground up for the cloud native era, delivered as a service. It accelerates the journey to microservices, secures and governs APIs and services, and it allows developers to rapidly design, publish and consume APIs and services. Konnect was built from the ground up with the unique needs of developers, architects and operators in mind.
About two and a half years ago, Kong first announced our Kubernetes Ingress Controller. We were stepping up to invest in the Kubernetes community by building a full-featured API gateway that operated in a Kubernetes-native way. Since then, we – as well as the rest of the broader Kubernetes ecosystem – have hit a number of additional milestones. Our Ingress Controller has run in tens of thousands of Kubernetes clusters, and we’ve continued to expand its functionality and stability.
Today we’re launching new names for some of our most popular API products. This is part of refreshing our outlook on the API space and our subsequent API lifecycle tools. We loved our old names, and know many felt the same. And yet, here we are to explain why we decided the progression was necessary.
Consistency is one of the most critical elements of accelerating API development as organizations try to meet increased demand, quality expectations, and regulatory requirements. Without a consistent API design to developers, there is no guarantee that the final result will match the intended purpose or the application depending on the API can function properly.
In 2018, Kong was first positioned onto the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Full Lifecycle API Management Market as a Visionary. This in itself was a very impressive feat given that Kong was started as an open source project just three years before that. I believe Kong’s progress on the Magic Quadrant in this short span of time speaks to how we have aligned Kong’s solutions to our customers’ most challenging problems.
