At API Summit, Kong announced the upcoming beta release of a brand new gateway deployment method in Kong Konnect: Serverless Gateways. Designed for speed, simplicity of use, and affordability, it’s the quickest way to deploy a Kong Gateway. Today, we're pumped to announce that all Konnect Plus users can deploy a fully managed Serverless Gateway! Users can set up API management infrastructure within seconds, enabling proof of concepts, testing, and experimentation — all without the typical financial and operational investments of traditional gateways.

If your team is looking for the ability to quickly deploy a lean, low-cost gateway for rapid prototyping and pre-prod environments, or if you’re looking to explore the value of an API management platform for your company, Konnect Serverless Gateways is a great place to start. However, if you’re looking for a more robust, production-ready gateway, we recommend you explore our hybrid and dedicated cloud gateway offerings. 

Serverless, Dedicated, Hybrid: Which one is right for you?

Why so many gateway deployment methods? We’ve learned that every organization’s requirements and environments are different down to the team level, and having the flexibility to deploy self-managed and/or fully-managed gateways meets our users where they are and accelerates their time to market. With the added availability of Konnect Serverless Gateways, we hope to enable developer teams to quickly and easily deploy a lean yet performant gateway for testing and development in non-production environments, so more time can be devoted to core app development and delivering outstanding services faster. And for those of you who may want to test out a Kong Gateway without the commitment of cost and time, go forth and explore!   

To help you understand which gateway is best for your needs, let’s think about this in a different framework — with coffee. For this purpose, let’s assume there are three ways to get your coffee:

1. The trusted café in your neighborhood: Here, you know a trained barista pulls great espresso shots and the espresso machine is top-notch. Yes, it’s a bit more expensive, but it's worth the ease of experience.
2. Your home coffee setup: It’s always there when you need it, and you have the ability to customize it to your preferences, including your type of beans, coffee equipment, and when you want to make it.
3. Dunkin' (or the nearby convenience store): Sometimes you need caffeine cheap and quick. This does the job well enough to keep you awake for the next few hours.

These three different ways to get your coffee are very similar in value to the three different ways to deploy a Kong Gateway.

Think of Dedicated Cloud Gateways like your favorite café. When you visit a high-end café with expert baristas and top-notch espresso machines, you expect excellent coffee and service — you're paying for their skill and expertise to enjoy a high-quality drink. The same goes for Dedicated Cloud Gateways. When you deploy a Dedicated Cloud Gateway, it’s on dedicated public cloud infrastructure (without noisy neighbors) of your choice, ensuring enhanced performance and security. With features like autoscaling, private networking, and multi-region deployments, you gain the operational flexibility needed for high availability and scalability. And because these gateways are fully managed by Kong, we take care of updates, security patches, and daily maintenance — just like how that skilled barista takes care of your cappuccino. 

Your home coffee setup, on the other hand, is like hybrid mode for your Kong Gateways. When you deploy a hybrid mode gateway, you have so much deployment flexibility across different data centers, geographies, and zones. And because your gateway is self-managed, you also get increased reliability. It’s the exact same with making coffee at home: you get to choose your beans and decide how to brew your coffee, and you can always count on having this option readily available at your home base.

Finally, when you need caffeine quickly and affordably, you might head to Dunkin', right? It’s accessible and convenient, much like a Serverless Gateway. Serverless Gateways are perfect for prototyping or testing APIs in pre-production without the commitment of the costs and resources typically necessary for a traditional API gateway. Like Dedicated Cloud Gateways, Serverless Gateways are also fully managed by Kong, so you don’t have to worry about deployment architecture or server management. Just as you grab-and-go with your Dunkin' coffee, you can set-and-go with managing your APIs in just a few clicks using a Serverless Gateway. 

Start using your first Serverless Gateway today!

What are you waiting for? Go from nothing to a performant Kong Gateway ready for your development and prototyping purposes in a matter of minutes, so your team can focus more on creating exceptional applications.

Head over to Konnect and you'll see the option to choose Serverless while creating a new gateway. Once created, the gateway will be available via a URL provided on the gateway overview page. You can then configure your gateway either through the Konnect UI, the gateway’s developer-friendly admin API, or any of the usual ways you would with Kong Gateway such as the popular tool decK. 

Get your 30-day free trial of Konnect Plus and start using your first Serverless Gateway today!