It's commonly accepted now that APIs and microservices are the future of how software will be built. The introduction of [application programming interfaces](https://konghq.com/blog/learning-center/what-is-api)application programming interfaces (APIs) first enabled development teams to expose services to the internet and provide value to their customers and partners.

For many organizations, this began the movement to microservices and decentralized architectures - enabling architects and developers to leverage a Tetris-like approach to building with software and providing their teams with improved flexibility and convenience at scale.

## **The Challenges of Decentralized Innovation**

Investing in modern development practices can improve customer experience, drive revenue and provide autonomy for teams, but it comes with many challenges. As teams embrace connectivity and create new connections through APIs and [microservices](https://konghq.com/blog/learning-center/what-are-microservices)microservices, maintaining control and visibility over these endpoints can become increasingly complex. Given that many of these mission-critical APIs are dispersed across disparate environments, teams can become overburdened with maintaining infrastructure rather than building functionality.

Legacy API management tools and platforms attempted to solve basic connectivity and integration use cases. However, as enterprises began moving from monolithic, centralized stacks to decentralized environments with modern stacks, legacy API management solutions simply haven't kept up. These legacy solutions lack the baseline performance, flexibility and extensibility needed to support an API and microservices-led architecture at scale.

Looking ahead, more organizations will be born [cloud native](https://konghq.com/learning-center/cloud-native)cloud native. While it's certain that there will be more companies that require an API gateway to operate across multi-cloud and Kubernetes, others may choose or be forced to avoid this model, and instead opt for on-premise or hybrid models for security, compliance and other reasons.

## **Flexibility Is Key To Facilitating Connectivity **

Regardless of where an organization is on its modernization journey, flexibility is key to its success. We built Kong for this very reason - to provide seamless service-to-service communication that is reliable, secure and observable across the full stack regardless of the underlying infrastructure. By supporting modern use cases that span multi-cloud and hybrid, Kubernetes-native, and multiple protocols, Kong decouples the connectivity concerns from the application developer’s workflow so they can focus on building new functionality instead of building pipes.

Where traditional [API management](https://konghq.com/blog/learning-center/what-is-api-management)API management presents challenges around downtime, inconsistent standards and high operational costs, Kong's platform drives architectural freedom at the edge, within applications and across applications via enabling consistent policies across all clouds and platforms. Coupled with improved workflows and [CI/CD integrations](https://konghq.com/blog/learning-center/continuous-integration-and-deployment-for-microservices)CI/CD integrations, Kong allows for the building of truly remarkable digital experiences, with an emphasis on speed, ease and flexibility for your team.

## **The World's Top Brands Trust Kong**

Kong's journey began with the vision that the future of software will run on APIs and microservices. We're proud that Gartner recognized us as a [Leader in the Magic Quadrant for Full Lifecycle API Management](https://konghq.com/reports/gartner-magic-quadrant-api)Leader in the Magic Quadrant for Full Lifecycle API Management and #1 overall in Completeness of Vision for the second consecutive year.

While we're still in the early innings of this movement, every day we see more and more global brands pushing to become API-led, cloud-first businesses. We're fortunate to partner with over 460 of these great brands across the globe, including household names such as Papa John's, Verifone, Nasdaq and Wayfair, who all trust Kong with their mission-critical workloads.

Kong was built with the modern technology landscape in mind. As organizations increasingly look to innovate in this dynamic, cloud native world, we're excited to support their modernization journeys and provide a flexible, lightweight solution to help build, secure and scale the world's APIs and microservices.

## **Introducing Kong Gateway 2.7 **

To date, Kong has managed trillions of transactions for customers, partners and our vibrant open source community. To continue this momentum, we're thrilled to enter 2022 with a new release of Kong Gateway, version 2.7.

This release features a 25% increase in throughput performance and increased latency performance over previous versions. With a faster core runtime, Kong Gateway 2.7 achieved 52,250 transactions per second (TPS) maximum throughput with a 100% success rate (up from 40,625 TPS in 2021). The new release also introduces enhanced capabilities to improve security, streamline workflows, and expand support for event-based and real-time architectures.

**Notable additional features and enhancements include:**

• - Ability to bulk-apply policies to APIs and developers automatically
• - [OpenID Connect](https://konghq.com/blog/openid-connect-api-gateway)OpenID Connect Configuration wizard for faster authentication setup
• - Support for new real-time and event-based use cases with [Kafka](https://konghq.com/blog/apache-kafka-api-gateway)Kafka and webhooks

"Kong is focused on delivering the technology innovations that matter to our customers - and that means API connectivity solutions that are highly performant, offer better security and more automation and provide the ability for customers to work seamlessly across platforms and software architectures," said Reza Shafii, VP of product at Kong Inc.