Software teams have found themselves in the center of the business’ strategy. Their strategic decisions on technologies to invest in has resulted in greater agility and the ability to build products that differentiate their companies in the market. As a result, optimizing the ability for software teams to deliver by investing in stronger tooling has become a core priority. 

This is reflected in Kong’s 2021 Innovation Benchmark Survey where ⅔ of technology leaders reported that their organizations are in the middle of a migration to distributed architectures. These migrations are typically technology-driven – but ultimately are charged with answering business challenges. For example, 

Business wants:

• Speed to Market: Features to go out as soon as they’re ready
• Cost Control: Lower cloud costs
• No Cloud Vendor Lock-iIn: Be able to host applications anywhere
• Great Customer Experience: No software down time

Developers and architects responded by:

• Breaking Up Applications: Breaking applications into smaller, independent pieces of code means that features can be shipped without waiting on other teams
• Using Containerization: Containers reduce physical application footprint while increasing scalability and repeatability between environments
• Distributing to Multi-Cloud: Using containers also allows the application to be deployed into any cloud, achieving application portability
• Migrating to Kubernetes Orchestration: Kubernetes helps manage all those containers and smoothly moves users from one version of the software to another

Results of Migrating to Kubernetes 

Engineering solved all of those business challenges (YAY!), but the solution led to NEW challenges. Before, application components were co-located, and some of the benefits of that architecture were taken for granted in the rush to adopt new architectures. Not all applications should migrate, and it’s important as a first step to determine if an application should be prioritized for migration based on risk and complexity. Follow the link on the image for more info on that topic. 

The benefits of a monolithic application that were overlooked tended to be:

• Ease of Collaboration: All application functionality used to be centrally located for any developer to access and interact with. In a microservice architecture, an understanding of the connected pieces becomes critical for future development.
• Troubleshooting: It was easy to listen-in on the entire end-to-end application from one location when the application became degraded.
• Security: In a co-located stack, intra-service communication is irrelevant, as the services live in the same technical domain. When this service becomes distributed, security between the logical tiers becomes a concern. 
• Reliability: Every interaction creates a small delay in the customer experience and creates a new potential point that could break. 

Moving from VMs to containers (when managed by an orchestrator like Kubernetes and platforms like OpenShift) is a great move. But if your teams are experiencing any of the above challenges, it may be because they didn’t consider how these architecture changes would impact all of the application pieces once they were broken apart and distributed. 

Kong has helped many companies, like Papa John’s, to solve these challenges through delivering a platform that creates connectivity between all of your application pieces, resulting in:

• API Consumability: Automated, high-quality, well-documented connection points (called APIs) for internal teams and external partners
• Reliability: Ensures performant, low-cost, bullet-proof communications to power your customer experience
• Security: Lower risk to your applications, business and customers
• Observability: To identify issues and fix them quickly if things break

Together, these attributes are what we call connectivity. Kong Konnect is a platform that helps your technical teams stitch together a fabric of all your application architectures, clouds and protocols. The results are teams that can pragmatically migrate to Kubernetes while maintaining the capabilities needed to successfully support your customers. 

Kong’s service connectivity platform, Konnect, gives the business the agility it needs, architects the flexibility to design with best of breed technologies, and DevOps engineers the ability to deliver scalable applications.