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Kong 1.1 Released with Declarative Configuration and DB-less Mode!

Today, we’re thrilled to announce the release of Kong 1.1! Building on the release of support for service mesh in Kong 1.0 last September, our engineering teams and community have been hard at work on this latest iteration of our open source offering. With new Declarative Config and DB-less deployment capabilities, as well as numerous small improvements and fixes, Kong 1.1 is one of our most exciting releases to date!

Below, we’ll highlight Kong 1.1’s new features, improvements and bug fixes, and what they mean for our users. Be sure to check back over the next few weeks as we follow up with more in-depth posts detailing these features.

Declarative Config

Kong 1.1 enables declarative config for more dynamic traffic management. By enabling declarative config, Kong users will be able to specify the desired system state through a YAML or JSON file instead of a sequence of API calls. Using declarative config provides several key benefits to reduce complexity, increase automation and enhance system performance.

Key Benefits:

• Create A Single Source of Truth
  • Consolidate your entire Kong configuration in a single YAML or JSON file to reduce the possibility of errors and simplify management.
• Reduce Complexity
  • Specify the desired state to create fewer moving pieces and eliminate intermediate inconsistent states.
• Automate Deployment Pipeline
  • Remove manual deployment tasks through integration with tools like Jenkins. Enable Kong to manage traffic with consistent configurations via your deployment pipeline.
• Expand Deployment Options
  • Increase infrastructure flexibility with declarative config to enable more deployment options for Kong to support K8S, service mesh and DB-less deployments.

Key Functions:

• New command: kong config init to generate a template kong.yml file to get you started
• New command: kong config parse kong.yml to verify the syntax of the kong.yml file before using it
• New Admin API endpoint: /config to replace the configuration of Kong entities entirely, replacing it with the contents of a new declarative config file

DB-less Mode

To support the use of declarative config and further reduce complexity and be more flexible for deployment, Kong 1.1 ships with the ability to enable DB-less mode. Users that turn on DB-less mode can manage their entire configuration in-memory to reduce modes of failure and maximize system resiliency.

Key Benefits:

• Increase Resource Efficiency
  • Eliminate DB overhead and dependencies by utilizing a single YAML or JSON file to store your Kong configurations.
• Simplify Management
  • Remove the need for databases to minimize complexity for use case configurations that can be held in memory.
• Quick Start
  • Streamline the process of getting Kong configured by leveraging a single file as opposed to DBs.
• Increase End-to-end Automation
  • Easily manage a fleet by integrating with CI/CD tools such as Ansible to push out configurations to Kong without any need for bespoke change database data.

Key Functions:

• New option in kong.conf: database=off to start Kong without a database
• New option in kong.conf: declarative_config=kong.yml to load a YAML file as the configuration.

Additional New Features in Kong 1.1

Entities Tags

• Be able to segment and track ownership of kong entities
• Increase search accuracy for Services and Admin API endpoints by taking advantage of Kong’s support for tags across all core entities.

Automatic Bulk DB Import

• Streamline the configuration process by automatically upserting all entities contained in a YAML file.

Automatic Transparent Proxying

• Minimize disruptions by defaulting to (optional) transparent proxying for all Routes without an assigned Service.

Improved Orchestration for Kubernetes Sidecar Injection

• Smooth your K8s deployment experience with the Kubernetes Sidecar Injection plugin (now bundled with Kong). Ease graceful termination when using orchestration tools with the new option for –wait in kong quit.

Other Improvements and Bug Fixes

Kong 1.1 also contains improvements to stream handling, support for ACL authenticated groups, and several bug fixes pointed out by our users. For the full details, check out the Change Log here!

As always, the documentation for Kong 1.1 is available online here. Additionally, as mentioned above, we will be discussing the key features in 1.1 in subsequent blog posts and on community calls, so stay tuned!

Thank you to our community of users, contributors, and core maintainers for your continuing support of Kong’s open source platform. Please give Kong 1.1 a try, and be sure to let us know what you think!

Kong Nation

As usual, feel free to ask any question on Kong Nation, our Community forum. Learning from your feedback will allow us to better understand the mission critical use-cases and keep improving Kong.

Happy Konging!