Today at Kong Summit, we are thrilled to announce several new products, features and capabilities across our entire service connectivity platform with the goal of making service connectivity as invisible and easily consumable as electricity. These updates include making the Kong Istio Gateway integration generally available and debuting Insomnia Projects. We’re excited to share them with you all. Below, we’ll provide a brief overview of each of these new announcements and releases with deeper dives to be provided in the coming weeks.

Kong Istio Gateway (Generally Available!)

One of the core principles we have here at Kong is to be truly agnostic. Ensuring open standards and support for technologies in the ecosystem is at the heart of what we believe in and our vision of making connectivity invisible like electricity. Today, we’re proud to double down on that vision by announcing the general availability of the Kong Istio Gateway integration. This integration will allow organizations and technologists to supercharge their Istio service meshes with the power of Kong Gateway’s best-in-class performance and 75+ out-of-the-box plugins.

But the capabilities for Istio users don’t end there. With the Kong Istio Gateway, customers can also use Kong’s entire suite of enterprise API management tooling, including the Developer Portal and ServiceHub API catalogue. These capabilities will allow organizations using Istio service meshes to provide the same consistent views, interfaces and experiences for their developers, DevOps and architects regardless of whether they are using a service mesh or not.

We’re excited to continue working with our customers and community to enhance the Kong Istio Gateway, so check it out today, and let us know what you think!

Announcing Kong Gateway 2.6 (Coming Soon!)

It wouldn’t be a Kong Summit if we didn’t have a major announcement for the product that started it all for us – Kong Gateway – and this year is a big one. We know that speed and throughput are two of the most critical aspects of what makes an API gateway successful in an enterprise. With Kong Gateway 2.6, we’re pleased to announce that we’ve taken the industry’s fastest API gateway and made it even faster, increasing throughput by 12% and decreasing latency by 30%.

Another critical capability we see customers ask for is the ability to conduct advanced transformations at the API gateway layer. Jq is an extremely popular framework for easily creating data transformations, and today we’re excited to announce it will be supported in Kong Gateway 2.6. With jq, Kong customers will be able to leverage the myriad useful existing jq libraries through the same simple Kong plugin interface.

We’re also pleased to announce major enhancements to our Kafka plugins. As event-based architectures are exploding, Kafka has quickly become the most popular way to enable streaming architectures within the enterprise. With Kong Gateway 2.6, we’re making it easier to use the gateway to secure and govern how these clients make themselves available to endpoints that expect REST and gRPC. With enhanced encryption via mTLS and streamlined AuthN and AuthZ, Kong customers will be able to more seamlessly use Kafka within their existing architectures.

Announcing Kong Mesh 1.5 (Coming Soon!)

When we created Kuma and Kong Mesh, we brought all of the learnings from Kong Gateway to the forefront of how we created the product. From the outset, we prioritized ease-of-use, support for multiple technologies and ease of customization to provide an easy-to-implement service mesh. We knew that the world doesn’t begin and end with Kubernetes, and so we designed Kuma and Kong Mesh to support virtual machines as well. Now with Kong Mesh 1.5, we’ve added Windows support to provide the ability to deploy both the control plane and data plane on Windows. This will allow Kong Mesh customers to run Windows workloads as part of a distributed mesh that can seamlessly communicate with all of their Linux and Kubernetes workloads running within Kong Mesh. Further, with security as one of the primary benefits of any service mesh, we’ve added Roles-based Access Control in Kong Mesh 1.5 to enable organizations to more easily scale how their service meshes are secured and governed. Reach out today to learn more about the new updates and how Kong Mesh can accelerate your organization’s adoption of service mesh.

Insomnia Projects (Generally Available!)

Collaboration is at the heart of APIs. Every API developer knows that you don’t build an API for yourself; you build it for others to consume. With APIs often being worked on by multiple people across multiple teams, it’s critical to be able to organize projects by the team or scope of the work. Insomnia Projects is the first step in providing a truly collaborative experience for API developers and designers to work together on designing specifications, running tests and creating overall better APIs. Check out the documentation on Insomnia Projects today to get started, and stay tuned for updates about even more powerful features!

WASMx (Technology Preview!)

API- and microservices-based architectures thrive on innovation. Today, we’re announcing the technology preview of WASMx, which will bring the power of the WebAssembly standard to Kong. With WASMx, customers will be free to customize their Kong Gateway deployments using a variety of languages. This will allow customers to tap into entirely new use cases, more easily create bespoke policies and leverage advanced automation to accelerate the way they bring new products to market. We’re thrilled at the prospects of what this project will become and are making WASMx available to existing customers today by request. If you’d like to get started with WASMx, reach out to your Kong customer experience manager today!

We’re excited for all of the announcements and for what we’ll be building over the next year. Be sure to tune into the rest of 2021 Kong Summit tomorrow or reach out to learn more about how Kong can help you build your connected enterprise.