Today at API Summit 2023, we’re launching a revolutionary update to Kong Konnect SaaS that brings together many of the innovations we’ve been developing this last year. This latest version of Kong Konnect is dedicated to visionary and pragmatic developers and customers who are working hard to make their organizations leaders in an API-first world.
For the first time ever, the Kong Konnect unified API platform can now bring together all API runtimes under one, single cloud management plane:
Moreover, Kong Konnect’s innovative cloud-native architecture not only enables users to address all API lifecycle management use cases in one place, but it is also designed to be modular and extensible to allow for an incremental buy-in approach. Work inside a unified platform, but still have the flexibility to pick the best of breeds for your specific use cases.
At the bottom of the above diagram is an illustration of the different API runtimes for managing traffic from the Edge (North-South) to the Mesh (East-West) on both standard VM, cloud, and Kubernetes workloads, bridging the gap between the old and the new API runtimes worlds. Those API runtimes come together under the Konnect management plane — a single pane of glass for their provisioning and management (hint: be on the lookout for an upcoming announcement on fully Konnect hosted Dedicated Cloud Gateways!) followed by easy and extensive capabilities to secure, observe, manage the traffic for, and optimize the performance of your APIs. All available through a beautiful and easy-to-use UI, but also, of course, automation-ready via public APIs and the runtimes much loved associated CLI tools: decK, kubectl, and kumactl.
The management plane powers our Core Platform, at the center of which lies the Service Hub, or your "API Inventory." This acts as a System of Record where users can catalog, tag, and collaborate around their API assets. We believe this is the most strategic real estate for an API-first company, as the visibility provided by a central inventory allows users to now deploy, run, manage, and consume all available APIs to suit their specific needs and preferences from an ultimate source of truth.
Next are the Federated Governance features which allow segmenting and orchestrating governance for both APIs and developers inside and outside the organization.
Then comes Analytics, Logs, and Monitoring. Get deep operational metrics and dependencies views to enable you to see what's happening inside your API’s “nervous system” and why it matters.
Finally comes API Products, which enable you to document any API, whether discovered from the runtimes or cataloged independently, and augment it with versioning information, rich documentation, and API specs, and publish it to a fully customizable portal (that you can run on your own modern web stack if you wish!) for developers to register and then discover and register to use your APIs as products.
At the top sits the Unified Dashboard, where all these pieces are orchestrated and accessible together in a power-user view.
The beauty of Kong Konnect is that it is an API platform itself so several Apps can be built on top of Konnect to solve adjacent use cases.
One of the first Apps we built is called API Products where you can compose different APIs into a product that can eventually be sold and monetized. In addition, we have built a cloud native Developer Portal to help you publish and onboard developers onto your internal or external developer platform in a fully customizable interface. We have many more new features coming on the developer portal, from multi-portal to better API consumer management and Backstage integrations.
And that’s not all. Kong Konnect Plus billing is now entirely consumption based, so you only pay for what you actually use in Kong Konnect Plus. And Kong will provide you with real-time metrics detailing your specific usage.
The new Konnect unified, and yet modular API Platform gives architects, platform builders, infrastructure operators, and application developers, a platform on which they can work together to build the API company of their dreams, with lightning-fast speed and efficiency.
One more thing . . . API Summit 2023 would not be complete without an AI announcement -;).
But for that, we have to wait for Day 2 and my co-founder and CTO, Marco Palladino’s keynote. Until then, let’s not forget that the more AI, the more APIs!
Onwards.
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