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We’re happy to announce the general availability of Kong Enterprise 3.2. In this release, we’ve taken significant steps to ensure the smooth and reliable operation of our API management solution.
In Kong Enterprise 3.2, we’ve delivered key functionality for customers that operate Kong Enterprise in a hybrid environment in order to further enhance its reliability. Specifically, we’ve expanded Kong Enterprise’s capabilities in the following areas:
In Kong Enterprise 3.2, we’ve addressed the issue of a potential disruption of service between control and data planes.
When customers running Kong Enterprise in a hybrid mode provision a data plane, it triggers a communication to the control plane to provide the latest configuration settings. This configuration is required by the data plane in order to start proxying traffic successfully. If, during the initial setup, the data plane is unable to contact the control plane and retrieve the latest configuration, the data plane is unable to start. This poses a challenging situation for customers especially if the communication between control and data plane is disrupted when traffic volume is high, which requires the data plane to scale out.
In 3.2, we addressed this issue for our customers. The solution involves a new type of data plane node called a “backup node” which writes the most current control plane configuration to either a GCP or AWS storage bucket.
This backup node receives configuration from the control plane and writes the configurations to the bucket specified by the customer. In the event of a control plane failure, a new data plane being provisioned can reach out to the specified bucket and retrieve the latest configuration data. The bucket connection specifics are configured via ENV variable on the data plane.
ENV
It’s worth noting that we’ve taken special care to ensure that any Kong version differential between data planes is taken into consideration and that new/restarted data plane(s) only retrieve backed-up configuration that is compatible with the version of Kong Enterprise that they’re running.
The specifics on how to configure this can be found in the documentation here.
The below diagram illustrates the advantages of this feature in the event that CP/DP communication is disrupted.
Figure 1: Dataplane scale out when the control plane is unreachable
We’re happy to announce that Kong Gateway 3.2 now supports latency-based steering.
Latency-based steering allows Kong load balancers to choose the “fastest” backend based on total response time when proxying to upstream services. Our latency-based steering implementation is based on the exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA), which ensures the balancer selects the upstream service based on the lowest average latency.
This algorithm is a good choice for services that receive a high volume of requests per second as it allows Kong to constantly rebalance the upstreams based on the most current response time data.
In this release, “latency” will be added as a load-balancing algorithm available during configuration (in addition to the existing round-robin, consistent-hashing, and least-connection algorithms).
In Kong Enterprise 3.2, Kong Manager has added support for the following gateway features:
Figure 2: Create key entities in Kong Manager
Kong Manager also adds various UX enhancements that include:
Figure 3: License usage report
Figure 4: Full linting and autocomplete support for the expression syntax
Figure 5: Test requests against expression-based routes
For a full list of features, fixes, and updates, please see the available CHANGELOG for Kong Enterprise here and Kong Gateway OSS here.
Get started with Kong Gateway 3.2 in Kong Konnect for free!
If you are interested in Kong Enterprise 3.2 you can also download it for free here! If you have Kong Gateway installed already, upgrading to 3.2 is easy – check out our upgrade guide.
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