Announcing Kong GCP Cloud Gateways (Beta)
Multi-cloud API gateways, without hosting a thing yourself
When speaking with platform teams who are responsible for setting up their organizations’ API platforms, we often hear: "We really want to offload the infra side of this. We don’t want our engineers spinning up their own locally hosted infrastructure or asking other infrastructure teams to do this. But, we are also on a multi-cloud journey, and vendor-managed solutions don’t give us the flexibility to deploy in our CSP of choice."
This is fair and a large reason why many organizations still choose to manage and pay for API infrastructure themselves.
Today, this changes with our fresh-off-the-press support for Kong cloud gateways . . . in GCP.
Kong Dedicated Cloud Gateways for Google Cloud is in beta. Keep reading to learn more!
GCP API gateways . . . that aren’t Apigee?
You heard it right. Just like we offer AWS API Gateways that aren’t “AWS API Gateway.” And like our Azure API Gateways that aren’t “Azure API Management.”
What do mean by all of this? Let’s quickly recap the Kong Dedicated Cloud Gateway offering.
Kong Dedicated Cloud Gateways: Vendor-managed and multi-cloud
Many teams often start with the API gateway from one or multiple CSP vendors that they work with. Typically, these solutions are easy to get spun up in your cloud provider’s console, easy to spend dedicated cloud spend against, and often do satisfy some very introductory and elementary use cases.
However, many organizations often outgrow these solutions. Whether it's due to a lack of enterprise functionality or being forced to deploy in a single CSP (e.g., GCP vendor-lock with the newest versions of Apigee) organizations find themselves in a place where they want to find more enterprise-ready solutions without sacrificing the ease and CSP-native nature of the CSP Gateway solutions.
This is where Kong Dedicated Cloud Gateways play.
Kong Dedicated Cloud Gateways (or DCGWs, for short), are fully Kong-managed cloud API gateways, but you can tell us which CSP and region of choice you want those gateways deployed in, and, if desired, utilize your cloud spend. We then spin up and provision gateways in our own Kong AWS, Azure, and (now) GCP cloud environments.
Dedicated Cloud Gateways are easy to find and easy to spin up
You can think of them like CSP Gateways as it pertains to ease of set up, but now you get:
- Platform-grade Kong functionality: Build a proper platform with a service catalog, developer portal, analytics, tracing, observability, and more
- Production-grade Kong deployments: Dynamically scale gateways with auto-pilot, ensuring seamless performance as traffic grows — no manual intervention required. Or, create a custom deployment where you explicitly configure underlying nodes resources and gateway replicas on a per-region basis.
- Enterprise-grade security: Support both encrypted connections over the public internet and private networking between DCGWs and your backend services with out-of-the-box support for AWS transit gateway and VNET peering
- CSP ease of deployment with self-hosted flexibility: Automatic deployment of a global and region-based smart DNS that chooses the best region to use for each API request based on real-time performance and latency affinity. Seamlessly modify your DCGW deployments with Kong plugins — just like you would with a self-hosted deployment
- World-class developer experience: Govern and simplify API management via Kong infrastructure-as-code and APIOps offerings, streamlining deployment and CI/CD workflows to drive efficiencies and governance by eliminating slow, error-prone manual work
- Cloud-agnostic flexibility: Kong Konnect Cloud Gateways is the only API gateway platform available on all three major cloud providers. Access 20+ regions across AWS, Azure, and GCP.
- Dedicated support: When you ring Kong, you get on a call with a Kong API specialist, not a general CSP provider support agents
Example multi-region AWS cloud API gateway
With Kong DCGW, you really do get all of the benefits of choosing your CSP’s API Gateway solution without all of the bad stuff.
What else is new with DCGWs?
Now that we’ve recapped our DCGW offering, let’s dig into what’s new. Yes, there’s GCP support, but there’s also more that make DCGWs even more capable of becoming your central cloud-based API runtime infrastructure.
The success of DCGW won’t just be in the variety of CSPs that we support. We have to continue to make our versions of API gateways on AWS, Azure, and GCP better than your CSPs'. Yes, we believe we're already there, but the updates keep coming. With this release, we’ve pushed two new major updates for DCGW customers:
- Custom plugin streaming for DCGW
- 99.95% SLA for all DCGW Gateways, with 99.99% on the way later this year
Let’s briefly dig into each.
Custom plugin streaming for DCGW (Tech preview)
Custom plugin streaming is the biggest change in plugin architecture since Kong was released. And now you get it in Konnect with DCGW. Custom plugin streaming gets you:
- A new custom plugin experience: Distribute custom plugins quickly and instantly with a single API call to the Konnect CP then manage the plugin how you see fit — through the GUI or declaratively with decK
- Quicker to install and update: Remove the need to create a custom gateway image, and streamline the distribution from the CP to as many data plane nodes as you have running
- Increased security and HA: The control plane becomes the source of truth for custom plugins, which can be managed centrally in Konnect, thereby removing security risks and challenges around managing different plugin versions across different data planes
SLA, security, and compliance updates
Kong’s commitment to three and four 9s uptime is huge, as it gets DCGW customers the same, or greater, uptime commitment than they get with the API gateway solution from the CSP directly.
The SOC 2 Type 2 commitment also gives organizations that want to save time, effort, and cost by offloading infra, the confidence that their move to cloud (and, with DCGW–multi-cloud) won’t result in compliance nightmares.
It’s time for multi-cloud-driven hypergrowth, at hyperefficiency, with hyperconfidence.
Watch it in action
We’ve spent this blog running through the “What?” and “Why?” of DCGW, but what about the “How?”
Anybody can jump into Konnect and get spinning up DCGWs in a matter of minutes. Here’s a video showing how:
Wrapping up
We’re very excited about where the future of cloud-based API infra is going, and we’re even more excited that it’s Kong — along with our customers and community —that are driving the space forward.
We look forward to seeing what you all build with Konnect DCGW. Let us know what you think!
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