Kong for AWS: How Cargill Uses Kong

In support of our partnership with AWS, we're re-examining how some of our major customers today are using Kong with AWS. To this end, let's look at our popular case study with Cargill.

For over 150 years, Cargill has been on a mission to nourish the world in a safe, responsible and sustainable way. Headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Cargill combines extensive supply chain experience with new technologies and insights to serve as a trusted partner for food, agriculture, financial and industrial customers across more than 125 countries. One of the largest private companies operating today, Cargill employs over 150,000 people worldwide and handles logistics for over a third of the world's food supply.

As an industry leader, Cargill has always recognized that enabling rapid innovation is critical to maintaining a competitive advantage. However, Cargill's legacy IT systems were slowing its ability to create new digital products and services to address the evolving needs of its customers and partners. In response to these new digital imperatives, Cargill began the process of transforming its internal suite of APIs to be more dynamic, thereby enabling consumption across the entire company.

With the goal of bringing more digital experiences to stakeholders, the Cargill API platform team came up with a plan to increase agility and transition from siloed legacy IT architecture to a modern, microservices architecture. Kong is lightweight and fast enough to run at the edge, with Kubernetes or in a mesh, which fits Cargill's vision perfectly. Together with Kong, Cargill achieves the low latency needed to deploy high-performance, cloud-native microservices and the flexibility to seamlessly integrate them across all of its systems.

In addition to superior performance and flexibility, Cargill used Kong to simplify management and monitoring across its highly complex architecture. Kong's out-of-the-box management tools and open source ecosystem provide Cargill with robust capabilities to simplify management of APIs across their entire lifecycle, allowing the company to bring more services to market more quickly and help manage them better once they're in production.

The second phase of the Cargill team's vision was to decentralize the platform to facilitate dynamic scalability. A major component of this was utilizing cloud native design patterns, and Kong's native support for Kubernetes was a critical factor in enabling the Cargill team to easily scale up and down with demand.

Cargill uses AWS EKS/Kubernetes for all cloud deployments. It deploys Kong through its pipeline using the Kubernetes ClusterIP type but allows ingress from the outside to Kong, and then Kong brokers incoming requests to the upstream APIs. Upstreams are defined within Kong as Kubernetes Services so that Kong only needs to be aware of the single Service name of each Upstream.

Everything in the stack is managed by AWS: EKS, RDS and Route 53. API teams are allowed to use whichever AWS capability they wish, including DynamoDB, MySQL and SQS, and the bulk of Kong activity is managed via Kubernetes.

The results of using Kong with AWS at Cargill have included up to 65x faster deployment times with automated validations; launching more than 450 new digital services in six months, and offering dynamic infrastructure that auto-scales up and down with demand.