We are proud to announce the General Availability of the latest version of our flagship enterprise offering, Kong Enterprise 2020. At last year’s Kong Summit, we announced our vision for the service control platform to serve as an intelligent information broker for the enterprise. Today, we’re proud to announce that we’ve taken the service control platform vision one step further to enable organizations worldwide to manage and optimize the entire service lifecycle. With the release of Kong Enterprise 2020 (KE 2020), Kong is the only solution that is designed to optimize today’s application modernization needs through intelligent automation and governance by design across the full lifecycle of APIs and services.  We’re providing customers with comprehensive service management from pre-production to post-production across all platforms, protocols and deployment patterns. KE 2020 completes the first phase of our vision to build an intelligent service control platform to manage the flow of information throughout the enterprise and expands our vision to incorporate the entire lifecycle of an API or service.

KE 2020 represents our most ambitious and feature-packed enterprise release to date. We created KE 2020 because organizations today must be able to rapidly innovate while maintaining governance. While legacy API management platforms hinder these efforts due to their inability to  support decentralized architectures, work across platforms, and enable automation, with KE 2020 organizations can modernize by embracing decentralized architectures, automating workflows, and adopting CI/CD practices. KE 2020 expands on our commitment to providing developers the freedom to build in the best way possible, while also providing management teams with tools to ensure efficiency and governance. In KE 2020, organizations of all sizes can automate the security, communication and orchestration of APIs and microservices across platforms, deployment patterns, and transport protocols.

Read on to get a preview of some of the exciting new features in this release. We’ll detail how these features can help you go beyond simple API Management to intelligently control the entire service lifecycle.

Join our upcoming webinar on Full Lifecycle service Management with Kong Enterprise 2020

Kong Studio for Integrated Service Design and Testing

Built on top of newly acquired Insomnia, Kong Studio provides a robust suite of tools to streamline the design and testing of REST and GraphQL services. Kong Studio simplifies development workflows and eliminates tedious tasks by providing the ability to generate code snippets in numerous languages, automating testing via OpenAPI linting, integrating into CI/CD workflows via Git Sync and enabling inspection of responses beyond just JSON and XML. Watch our recent webinar on Kong Studio or Learn more about Studio here.

Multi-Protocol Support for gRPC, GraphQL and Kafka

Kong’s multi-protocol support eases the adoption of emerging service platforms. With the ability to unify communications across REST, gRPC, GraphQL, and data streaming services, Kong customers can unlock new service platforms, use cases, and architecture paradigms without risk of siloes.  Kong’s native support for gRPC and REST, combined with seamless integrations with Apollo GraphQL server and Apache Kafka, allows users to effortlessly apply consistent policies across all services to minimize friction and maximize control. Learn more about multi-protocol support here.

Visual Service Map with Kong Brain

Expanding on the capabilities unveiled last year, the latest release of Kong Brain features a powerful Service Map to help organizations understand their entire service architecture via an elegant visual interface. Kong Brain automatically generates and updates the Service Map to provide a real-time view of your entire service architecture. Learn more about Kong Brain here.

Improved Collaboration and Onboarding with Kong Teams

Kong Teams provides enhanced collaboration, security and onboarding capabilities to allow KE users to easily scale their deployments across their entire organization. With Kong Teams, KE users can easily segment users into working groups, implement policies across entire environments, and quickly onboard new users while ensuring compliance. Role-Based Access Control and Workspaces allow users to assign administrative privileges and easily grant or limit access privileges to individual users and consumers, entire teams, partner companies, and environments across the Kong platform. Learn more about Kong Teams here.

Major Updates to the Kong Manager and Kong Dev Portal 

KE 2020 features big improvements to Kong Manager and the Dev Portal to provide a significantly upgraded user experience. Both products now provide streamlined permissions, simpler management workflows and greater flexibility to make it easier to get the most out of Kong. The latest version of the Dev Portal makes it even easier to customize your portal and reduce onboarding friction to provide an optimal developer experience internally and externally. To learn more, check out the Manager and Dev Portal pages.

To learn more about how to upgrade to Kong Enterprise 2020, see our upgrade documentation.