Kong and Red Hat: Delivering Seamless Customer Experience

As companies are transforming themselves to compete in the cloud era, there's renewed emphasis on delivering seamless customer experience, improving IT infrastructure, and releasing applications faster. As companies embark on the cloud adoption journey, Red Hat OpenShift gives developers a greater choice of components to build robust applications. It’s no surprise that when we think about running enterprise Kubernetes platforms securely at scale in hybrid and multi-cloud environments, Red Hat OpenShift is top of mind.

Like a fine wine paired with a meal prepared by an executive chef, Kong Gateway, Kong Ingress Controller, and Kong Mesh further enhance the security and developer experience on top of Red Hat's platform and within its product portfolio. This not only creates a world-class solution and development platform, but it also helps customers deliver their applications more efficiently and securely, with a standardized management stack to any cloud infrastructure or on-premises environment.

Kong and Red Hat collaboration

Kong has been working hard to ensure our products deliver a first-class experience within the Red Hat open hybrid cloud ecosystem, with the objective to provide a greater value to its customers. In order to address our customer's rapidly evolving needs, Kong is announcing its Red Hat Ansible Certified Content Collection.

Red Hat Certified Ansible Content Collection

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform provides access to over 100 certified content collections created by third parties within its Ansible automation hub.

These Collections help customers streamline the creation of automation workflows by providing reusable enterprise-grade content. Automation assets are vetted through a certification process conducted by Red Hat to ensure their quality, and are co-supported by the partner and Red Hat.

Kong for Kubernetes deployment automation

As part of this program, Kong has built an end-to-end automation process to deploy Kong API Gateway to Red Hat OpenShift and Kubernetes environments alike.

With the release of Kong's Red Hat Ansible Certified Content Collection, customers can streamline the delivery of Kong for Kubernetes, Kubernetes Enterprise, Kubernetes with Kong Enterprise, and Kong Ingress Controller to their platforms.

The Red Hat Ansible Certified Collection for Kong is available for customers at Ansible Automation Hub and is jointly supported by Kong and Red Hat (Red Hat login required). The Ansible Community version of the collection is available at Ansible Galaxy and GitHub.

The benefit to customers is an enhanced experience when managing systems of scale.

The Red Hat Ansible Certified Collection covers end-to-end automation considerations including automated Kubernetes ‘Secret’ resource creation for: Kong Enterprise license, PostgreSQL admin and user passwords, Kong Manager RBAC configuration, Kong Manager and Kong Developer Portal sessions cookie configuration, and Kong Gateway hybrid-mode certificates. Typically these are required additional steps for deploying Kong Enterprise with Helm alone. Complex hybrid and multi-cloud architectures are fully supported and Kong's automation capabilities easily remove much of the complexity, while still allowing customers to compose the appropriate deployments for their production needs.

In addition to ease of deploying and managing Kong, customers leveraging the Red Hat Ansible Certified Content Collection are provided additional automation capabilities to further extend and enhance Kong for enterprise-grade deployments within the OpenShift and Kubernetes ecosystem.

cert-manager integration automation

Today customers can fully automate the deployment of the CNCF cert-manager project, along with predefined configurations for Kong Ingress Controller. This allows for the automated provisioning of TLS certificates with Kong Ingresses.

external-dns integration automation

Additionally, Kong's Red Hat Ansible Certified Content Collection supports the deployment of the CNCF external-dns project, with support and configuration for connecting to the AWS Route53 DNS provider. When combined with the automated deployment of Kong, customers can achieve fully automated DNS management, which works flawlessly in concert with Kong and cert-manager integrations.

Check out the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform for more information. And keep up with all the Kong product news and releases coming out of Kong Summit 2022 this week by following us on Twitter.