🎂 Make a wish and blow out the candles…we’re celebrating Kong’s sixth anniversary! 👏👏👏

In 2015, Mashape open sourced Kong Gateway, launching the next generation of API management. In our last anniversary post, I took a look back at our history. For this 6th anniversary post, I’ll focus on how this year went and look forward to what’s coming up next.

Product Usage Grew Exponentially

Kong is the most widely adopted OSS API gateway in the world with over 1.7M instances running across organizations of any size and in every vertical, with more than 257M downloads. 

Kong Gateway has supported our remarkable growth over the last few years. Last year, we hosted more than 11,000 proxies and 4.5 billion transactions per month on our open source, Kong-based gateway platform.

~Jeremy Justus, senior software engineer at UnitedHealth Group/Optum

And while Kong is platform-agnostic and supports 20+ distributions, Kong’s Kubernetes Ingress Controller needs a special mention as one of the most popular ways to deploy a modern API gateway ingress.

Our Community More Than Doubled in Size

The Kong Gateway OSS community has grown from 50,000 to 130,000 since our last birthday, continuing to solidify its place as the world’s most popular API gateway. 

I’d like to give a special thanks to our biggest code contributors. We couldn’t do this without your help improving Kong as a product: @nvx, @pariviere, @ishg, @Asafb26, @WALL-E, @jeremyjpj0916, @Abhishekvrshny, @ealogar, @amberheilman and @carnei-ro.

And a special thanks to our top content contributors who have helped us grow the community by demonstrating their amazing Kong Gateway OSS projects: Jeremy Justus, Ross Sbriscia, Ivan Rylach, Mert Simsek, Ashwin Sadeep and Daniel Kocot.

Four Releases Pushed

Since our last anniversary, we went from release 2.0 to 2.4. Here are some of the most significant features we’ve released over the last year:

• JavaScript PDK to implement custom logic at various points of the request processing lifecycle
• UTF-8 character support in route and service names for Russian, Japanese, Chinese or any number of other languages (or even emojis 😊)
• UDP support, including proxying, load balancing and running plugins, giving users similar functionality for UDP that was already available for TCP
• Liberate logs by removing fields, creating new fields with specific timestamps/unique IDs or even rearranging logs into a specific tool’s required format 
• Security improvements to ensure that Kong is secure by default
• Go support extended to include reading the upstream response and presenting it to Go plugins as well through a new response callback
• Enable or disable buffering of requests and responses on a per-Route basis to better adjust Kong’s buffering behaviors for each endpoint and ensure optimal latency especially for endpoints that deal with large payloads
• Reconfiguration of the load balancers asynchronously to ensure configuration changes made to the Upstream and Target entities do not cause perceptible latency spikes anymore
• Expanded support for gRPC by introducing two new plugins that are specific for gRPC traffic: grpc-web and grpc-gateway
• Hybrid Mode or control plane/data plane (CP/DP) separation to make Kong administration easier

A full list of changes and related PRs are in the Kong CHANGELOG.

Kong Gateway OSS Runs the World

On our sixth anniversary, I’ve come to the realization that Kong is everywhere. From digital banking applications to food delivery services, people around the world are interacting with our API gateway on a daily basis. Even with so much progress this year, we’re just getting started!

In a landscape driven by open source technologies and communities, I am proud of the pioneering work that Kong and our community have accomplished in our OSS journey. 

Kong was the first mainstream cloud native API gateway platform to be released after two dark decades of closed source monolithic tools in this space, and it wouldn’t be the most adopted API gateway technology today – six years later – without the contributions and the genuine feedback of a strong community that really cared. 

Kong’s adoption today is stronger than ever, and I am looking forward to all the innovation that we are going to be building together, to turn the old status quo upside down and provide the modern infrastructure of an API-powered world.

Stay in Touch With the Community

Thank you to the Kong Community for your support and contributions! To get the latest updates and project ideas:

• Star us on GitHub
• Follow us on Twitter
• Join the Kong Community
• Join our Meetups
• Ask and answer questions on Kong Nation
• Apply to become a Kong Champion