So many announcements, so many surprises and a seemingly never-ending list of impactful customer stories! After two and a half days packed with fun and learning, we bid farewell to Kong Summit for another year. If you were one of the almost 5,000 people that registered, you know exactly what we are talking about. Here is a recap of some of the most exciting parts of Kong Summit 2021.

We are thrilled to be once again recognized as a Leader in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Full Lifecycle API Management. We believe this recognition reinforces our commitment to our customers, who rely on us to continue innovating so they can build solutions that unlock growth, security and innovation for their companies. Kong is the most adopted API gateway, with over 2.6M instances running worldwide.

Infrastructure as code is a core component of all modern SRE team’s day-to-day work. There are plenty of options available, but the one that I’m most excited about is Pulumi. Instead of writing a domain-specific language (DSL) to configure your infrastructure, Pulumi lets you write the language you already know. For me, that’s Typescript, but if you prefer Go, Python or DotNet programming languages, that’s an option too.

Kubernetes continues to lead the container orchestration charge. In fact, according to the latest CNCF survey, 83% of respondents said they were using Kubernetes in production. Kubernetes provides you with key features such as self-healing capabilities, automated rollouts and rollbacks, automated scheduling, scaling, and infrastructure abstraction. This provides a truly extensible, highly available and infrastructure-agnostic environment to deploy all your modern microservices-based applications.

We’re seeing a massive shift in how companies build their software. More and more, companies are building—or are rapidly transitioning—their applications to a microservice architecture. The monolithic application is giving way to the rise of microservices. With an application segmented into dozens (or hundreds!) of microservices, monitoring and consolidated logging become imperative.

We are now deep into our most anticipated event of the year, Kong Summit 2021 (there’s still time to register for Day 2!). More than 4,000 people have registered from 87 countries for the virtual event. After a full day of knowledge and surprises, we are excited to recap the most memorable moments from today.

Today at Kong Summit, we are thrilled to announce several new products, features and capabilities across our entire service connectivity platform with the goal of making service connectivity as invisible and easily consumable as electricity. These updates include making the Kong Istio Gateway integration generally available and debuting Insomnia Projects. We’re excited to share them with you all.

Let’s face it: In today’s modern world of cloud and containers, there are still thousands of legacy applications that were not written with an API-first approach. Some legacy systems can still provide tremendous value today, but the means for accessing them are completely out of date, thus rendering them almost useless.

While monitoring is an important part of any robust application deployment, it can also seem overwhelming to get a full application performance monitoring (APM) stack deployed. In this post, we’ll see how operating a Kubernetes environment using the open-source Kong Ingress Controller can simplify this seemingly daunting task! You’ll learn how to use Prometheus and Grafana on Kubernetes Ingress to simplify APM setup.

As the software application world moves from monolith architectures to microservices, we are also seeing a shift toward developing modular and reusable APIs. According to APIOps, reusable APIs are consumable APIs, which means they must be well-documented and compliant. The separation between the designers, builders and consumers of an API grows larger and larger, making the API specification even more central to that API’s success.

Automating digital transformation API deployments can help speed time to market and minimize the resources required for the deployments — if developers can be assured that the automated process meets all necessary security requirements. It’s a topic that Kong Senior CustomerExperience Manager Peggy Guyott and Kong Senior Solutions Engineer Ned Harris discussed on a recent webinar as part of the Destination: Automation 2021 digital event.

Event hooks are a brand new feature we launched with Kong Gateway 2.5 that allows you to get notifications when certain events happen on your Kong Gateway deployment. If you want to keep an eye out for when your system creates new administrators or adds new plugins to a latency-sensitive route, this is the feature for you! Event hooks is a Kong Gateway Enterprise feature. Interested in learning more? Contact our sales team.

As more and more companies move to a multi-cloud strategy and increase usage of a cloud native infrastructure, API providers are under a lot of pressure to deliver APIs at scale in multi-cloud environments. At the same time, APIs should follow each company’s security requirements and best practices, no matter the cloud platform. These reasons explain why many providers have such complex API authorization requirements.

Just under one year ago, we launched version 1.0 of our Kong Ingress Controller (KIC). That was a huge milestone for us here at Kong, and we know it was for you – Kong Nation – as well. Since then, with the help of our community, we’ve merged over 300 new features and bug fixes and have started to enter a new era of KIC: version 2.0. Prior to releasing KIC 2.0, we want to make sure to incorporate community and customer feedback, so we are announcing the KIC 2.0 Beta.

In 2019, my team at Kong introduced a new open source project called Kuma. Now a sandbox project of the CNCF, Kuma is a modern, universal control plane for service mesh based on Envoy. As we celebrate Kuma’s achievements, I want to thank the Kuma community for your support and contributions!

Modern microservices-based architectures require companies to change not just the way they build applications but also how to deploy them. Basically, the new microservices foundation should be based on two main pillars: hybrid deployments and Kubernetes orchestrator. With the complete separation of the control plane (CP) and data plane (DP), Kong Gateway fully supports hybrid deployments.

More and more companies are eager to move their operations to the cloud. Yet, there’s quite a bit of ambiguity on what moving to the cloud actually means. Is your business running in the cloud while you host your database on another platform or while you rely on a third-party service to handle your payments? That’s a good start for moving to the cloud, but there are many other aspects to consider when building a cloud native infrastructure.

In my Service Mesh 101 article, I talked about some of the basics behind a service mesh: what it is, what it does and where Envoy fits into a service mesh. Having now covered those basics, I’d like to dig into some more in-depth content focused on the basics of Envoy configuration in a service mesh. Recall from the previous article that several different service meshes use Envoy. Istio is an example of a service mesh that leverages Envoy for its data planes.