Product Releases
September 11, 2024
4 min read

Kong Introduces Konnect Serverless Gateways: Lightweight, Cost-Effective, and Fully Managed Kong Gateways

Jesse Miller
VP of Product Growth, Kong

Developers, particularly with smaller budgets and teams, who want to manage APIs and deploy API infrastructure for use cases such as proof of concepts, testing, and experimentation face prohibitive obstacles to getting started. The traditional setup of API gateways typically demands significant investments in infrastructure and expertise. Not only is this process time-consuming and costly, it also diverts resources away from core development and slows down time to market. Once set up, site reliability engineering teams must grapple with the operational burden and overhead of gateway infrastructure, lifecycle management, and ongoing maintenance. For dev teams wanting to deploy a gateway for rapid prototyping or to test APIs in pre-production environments, the options for an easy-to-use and economical solution are slim.

This is where Kong Konnect Serverless Gateway steps in. We're thrilled to unveil our latest innovation designed to provide developers with a lightweight, cost-efficient, and fully managed solution for API management. Serverless Gateways, soon to be in public beta, allows application development teams to quickly deploy and test gateways without the financial strain and extensive operational overhead, so teams can get to value and the market faster. These gateways are a great starting point for smaller, agile teams; if they are ready or have a need for more capable, secure, and robust API infrastructure, they can easily upgrade to hybrid gateways or Konnect dedicated cloud gateways. Our dedicated cloud gateway supports autoscaling, private networking, and multi-region deployments so that it is ready to scale with any size application.

Get a gateway up and running in minutes

Kong Konnect Serverless Gateways are the fastest and easiest way for users to take advantage of Kong’s API management capabilities. You can go from nothing to a fully featured Kong Gateway ready for your development and prototyping purposes in a matter of minutes. With serverless gateways, you don’t need to worry about architecture deployment details or server management. With simply a few clicks, Kong takes care of the entire setup process, leaving you and your team free to focus on what truly matters — crafting exceptional applications.

Creating a Serverless Gateway couldn't be easier. Once released, you'll see the option to choose Serverless while creating a new gateway. Nearly instantly 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

Imagine a startup working to launch a new API product. Resources may be spread thin and they want to quickly be able to secure their API so that only registered customers can have access. By using Kong’s Serverless Gateway, they’re able to swiftly launch their API, ultimately bypassing the delays and expenses associated with conventional infrastructure. And because Kong handles all the setup and upkeep, using serverless gateways extends their team — akin to having seasoned experts working in the background — freeing their developers to be focused on their core product features. 

Gateway management made effortless

Serverless Gateways abstract away the details of gateway management, so you can get started quickly in testing or development environments and minimize operational load. We handle the infrastructure, lifecycle management, and maintenance of your serverless gateways, so your developer teams can build their applications without delay and your SRE and operations teams can dedicate their expertise to where it matters most: ensuring the reliability and performance of critical production systems. 

Easily bring your own domains for seamless integration into existing environments. Also, Serverless Gateways are built on our established Kong Gateway so they can be easily integrated into existing CI/CD pipelines via our APIs and IaaS (Terraform) tooling for a streamlined development experience. We’ll even keep Gateways running on the latest version of Kong to ensure a high level of security and resiliency.

At a fraction of typical costs, instantly make the most of Kong Konnect, Kong’s API management platform, with a Serverless Gateway. Self-managed and public cloud-hosted gateways can get expensive very quickly and may become difficult to finance, particularly when it comes to testing and non-production environments. In addition to being the most cost-efficient and easiest way for customers to manage their APIs with Kong, customers can rest assured that as their business and API management needs grow, Konnect will scale with them. 

Coming soon to Kong Konnect

Whether you're a startup or small development team looking for a cost-effective way to manage your APIs, or simply looking to get started with a Kong Gateway in your pre-production environments, Konnect Serverless Gateways can help you accelerate your development and time to market, streamline API management, and optimize your infrastructure costs.

Kong Konnect Serverless Gateways will be available in Beta very soon. Follow Kong on LinkedIn and X to stay up-to-date on the latest releases, and learn more about Kong’s Cloud Gateway offerings here. To sign up for Konnect Plus for free, register here.