Today, we are proud to announce the general availability (GA) of one of the most important releases of Kong Enterprise we've had to date — Kong Enterprise 2.1 is here!
This release represents a fundamental shift in how customers can deploy, manage and scale Kong Enterprise across their organizations. With 2.1's new "Hybrid Mode," we've made it dramatically easier for customers to implement and instrument large-scale deployments across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
Supporting this fundamental shift towards simplicity in Kong Enterprise are myriad enhancements, including a GA version of App Registration, enterprise support for the Golang PDK and enhanced reporting capabilities via Kong Vitals.
Below, we'll dive deeper into the new features and capabilities Kong Enterprise brings our customers. Be sure to upgrade or try it today!
Hybrid Mode Deployment
Customers can now run Kong data plane instances across multiple data centers, clouds and geographies without needing a Cassandra deployment that spans the data planes. Also known as control plane/data plane (CP/DP) separation, Hybrid Mode allows Kong proxies to be deployed anywhere, with the entire cluster controlled from a single point (the control plane). With Hybrid Mode, data plane configurations are pushed from the control plane as necessary rather than via a dedicated shared database. This feature has been battle-tested in Kong Gateway Community to significantly improve security and performance for large Kong clusters while reducing operational costs.
You can manage Kong Enterprise add-ons including Kong Manager, Dev Portal, Vitals, Immunity, and Brain from a single Control Plane that spans multiple clusters across different data centers and platforms. This means that you can distribute Kong Enterprise instances in Data Plane mode over any of Kong's supported environments, while still connecting back to the Control Plane.
Application Registration
In Kong Enterprise 1.5, we provided a beta version of application registration that allowed customers to package a set of backend services together. In Kong Enterprise 2.1, we're pleased to provide a robust implementation of application registration via both Dev Portal and Kong Manager. With this release, Kong Enterprise now provides support for any OIDC-compliant IdP in the Dev Portal app registration process. This means it's even easier to fit Kong into a customer's technology stack, provide APIs as products, and allow API consumers to self-serve access to APIs in the Dev Portal.
Golang PDK Support
With 2.1, plugins can now be built entirely in the popular Golang programming language in addition to the existing Lua plugins. By providing the Golang PDK, we're opening up Kong's ecosystem to vastly more developers and making onboarding to Kong Enterprise easier. To help our customers get started with building in Go, we've created the Go Plugin Development Guide.
Enhanced Reporting for Kong Vitals
Kong Enterprise 2.1 ships with a new interface for Kong Vitals that lets DevOps view usage dashboards as well as generate and export reports. With just a few clicks, customers can generate reports for all metrics collected by Kong Vitals. Use the reports feature to browse, filter, and view your metrics in a time-series generated report. Once you've settled on the view you like, reports can be exported into reporting and spreadsheeting tools as needed by customers to simplify compliance and better understand the health of their Kong Enterprise deployment in the tools of their choosing.
Other Enhancements
Please note this above list only touches on some of the larger features in this release. For a complete list of changes, check out the Kong Enterprise 2.1.3 Changelog.
Try it Today!
We're thrilled to be able to share this latest release with you, and we're proud of the contributions from Kong employees, our awesome customers, and our great community! Kong Enterprise 2.1.3 is available today as a free trial and for our customers to download.
As always, please be sure to reach out to us if you have any questions!