The concept of zero-trust security is relatively simple. In essence, no entity or system should have trust by default. You should assume that any system you are talking to is not trustworthy until you establish otherwise. Within Kong Konnect, one mechanism to apply zero-trust is the OpenID Connect API gateway plugin. In this post and the below recording from our recent Destination: Zero-Trust virtual event, I’ll cover OpenID at a high level and some of its applications and use cases.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the culture change side of any technology transformation program is the hardest and slowest part to get right. If you cannot efficiently operationalize a technology investment, that investment is wasted. This is no different in the world of APIs and microservices, where every service is designed to support a change to a digital-first culture. APIOps makes this change possible.

In this first section, I’ll provide a quick overview of the business case and the tools you can use to create a Kubernetes ingress API gateway. If you’re already familiar, you could skip ahead to the tutorial section. Digital transformation has led to a high velocity of data moving through APIs to applications and devices. Companies with legacy infrastructures are experiencing inconsistencies, failures and increased costs. And most importantly, dissatisfied customers.

This blog post is part two of a three-part series on how we’ve scaled our API management with Kong Gateway, the world’s most popular open source API gateway. We understand that this post’s title may seem a little controversial. When we announced that our new API gateway solution might be an open source product, we got many questions from voices across the company.

As you build and maintain more applications, your authentication strategy becomes increasingly important. It may also be top of mind for your boss since technology leaders cited “improve application security” as one of their top priorities in this year’s Digital Innovation Benchmark. The Kong Gateway JWT plugin is one strategy for API gateway authentication. JWT simplifies authentication setup, allowing you to focus more on coding and less on security.

Today, we have really exciting news to share with you all. The Enterprise version of our Kong Gateway is now generally available, and it’s like nothing we’ve ever released before. One standout component of version 2.3 is that it now has a “free” operating mode so that anyone can start off using the Enterprise gateway product – something previously reserved for only our paying customers.

Imagine you’re going through immigration at the airport. The immigration officer says, “I don’t need your passport because I trust that you are who you claim to be.” Wait, what? That would never happen, right? That’s because trust is exploitable. Sooner or later, somebody will try to lie about who they are, and thus a criminal could enter the country. That’s why countries must enforce some form of identity, like a passport, to certify travelers are who they claim.

Today, we’re excited to share that Kong has closed a $100M Series D financing led by Tiger Global with participation from new investor Goldman Sachs as well as existing investors Index Ventures, CRV, Andreessen Horowitz and GGV Capital. This raise triples our valuation to $1.4 billion and will allow us to scale our go-to-market operations even faster.

As part of the UnitedHealth Group (UHG), Optum optimizes healthcare technology, and one of our important missions is to provide the tech infrastructure for this Fortune 7 healthcare giant. UHG has over 300,000 employees, thousands of APIs, and countless integrations and external systems. It’s safe to say that a lot happens in our environments.

Today, we’re thrilled to announce the general availability of Kong Konnect, the service connectivity platform designed from the ground up for the cloud native era, delivered as a service. We live in a connected world. Every application we use, whether within or outside of work, is a connected application built on top of dozens – sometimes thousands – of services that enable our digital, connected experiences.