News
October 7, 2020
3 min read

Introducing Kong Konnect

Aghi
Augusto Marietti
CEO & Co-Founder of Kong

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.

Service Connectivity for the End User Era

Konnect was built from the ground up with the unique needs of developers, architects and DevOps in mind. Each user workflow within the SaaS-based management plane and ServiceHub has been thoughtfully constructed to increase efficiency, accelerate application development and ensure a reliable and secure experience.

Most importantly, Konnect will allow Kong to deliver our customers new innovations, enhancements and updates even more rapidly. As your teams look to move faster and deliver more, we will move faster alongside you to help you go further.

Service Connectivity Delivered as a Service

Kong Konnect addresses these challenges by delivering reliable connectivity as a service for every user across the full stack - at the edge, between apps and teams and within each app. Konnect provides 5 main components:

Runtime Manager enables users to instantly spin up Kong's battle-tested API gateway, Kubernetes Ingress and service mesh runtimes on any environment with just a few clicks. This allows Konnect users to provide best-in-class performance and scalability for maximum service reliability, while managing their lifecycle, from provisioning to day-2 operations, in a 100% consistent manner

Service Hub – provides a unified interface and comprehensive catalog for every service within an organization. It allows Konnect users to socialize, discover, consume, manage and distribute services across their organizations to increase discovery and re-use.

Vitals – allows users to monitor Kong services and transactions in real time to understand the health of their runtimes, clusters, and the individual services within them to optimize performance and reliability.

Dev Portal – Enables the publishing of services to individual Dev Portals to improve the developer experience and increase consumption through a bespoke experience for developers within and outside your organization.

Insomnia API Designer – Konnect's Insomnia integration provides a seamless experience between the SeriviceHub and Insomnia Designer. It allows developers to instantly begin editing, testing, and exploring APIs they find in the ServiceHub with a single click.

Reliable Connectivity Is a Necessity

Since we first began building Konnect over a year ago, the world has changed a lot. When we started we were doubling down on our belief that connectivity would become paramount to every business's success. Once COVID-19 hit, it amplified overnight all the challenges we were building Konnect to address. Companies and organizations had to adapt and evolve faster than previously thought possible.

With the shift to the new reality, two universal truths have emerged - reliability dictates experience, and speed of innovation defines winners versus losers. So what does this mean? It means that three fundamental technology challenges will be at the core of business success over the next decade:

  1. How can we develop applications orders of magnitude faster?
  2. How do we get built-in reliability?
  3. How can we deliver connectivity for every end-user?

What's Next? We at Kong are extremely excited for what Konnect will bring, and there are many more new capabilities and enhancements on the horizon in our journey into end-to-end connectivity. Konnect will serve as the nervous system connecting our portfolio of connectivity solutions like Kong Mesh, Insomnia and the Kong Ingress Controller as well as exciting new R&D projects under development like Kong Embedded for local deployments on IoT devices

We're just getting started and looking forward to working with you on this connectivity journey.