A UI Comes to OSS! Introducing Kong Manager Open Source
At Kong, we love APIs! They’re the foundation of modern architecture, and we believe they’re only going to expand in scope over time. We also support a number of different tools to manage APIs — from decK for declarative Kong Gateway configuration to Kong Insomnia for development and exploration of APIs.
Today, we’re happy to announce one more tool for our largest user base: a user interface (UI) for Kong Gateway OSS.
We've seen a growing demand for a more visual and intuitive interface, particularly from our users who are technically adept but also value the intuitiveness of a visual interface. (We see you, and now you can see this.) We've had this feature in our premium offering, Kong Enterprise, for some time, and we're excited to now extend this capability to our open source users. We're calling this UI Kong Manager Open Source.
Whether you’re just getting started with Kong Manager Open Source, are a visual learner, or want to perform some simple tasks with good old fashioned “clickops,” UIs can be an easy tool for our open source power users to reach for.
Our goal is to provide as many options as possible for open source users to use for whatever they are most comfortable with. Our hope with this feature is to supplement other tools that we already provide to developers with a visual surface for managing your Kong Gateway configuration.
Kong Manager Open Source works in concert with tools Kong already provides, like decK. For example, if you want to make changes in your configuration via the UI, you can use decK to dump the changes, and then manage your configuration declaratively from there. Sometimes a visual experience can be useful for staging changes, and with the suite of tools Kong offers, you can still take advantage of tracking your configuration in Git with decK.
Alternatively, a UI can be an easy way to try out new configurations. If your experiment doesn’t pan out after using Kong Manager Open Source, you can simply revert the changes with a deck file from a prior configuration. Sometimes a combination of tools is best for quick experiments!
With Kong Manager Open Source, we hope to provide our users with the best of both worlds and offer a suite of comprehensive tools that can work in concert with each other. Whatever you’re comfortable with, we want to support you.
Install a new Kong Gateway OSS instance and try out Kong Manager Open Source today!