News
November 28, 2022
3 min read

Kong announces Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA), AWS Graviton Processor, and Bottlerocket OS Readiness

Danny Freese
Senior Software Engineer on Konnect, Kong

Kong connects APIs and microservices natively within clouds, data centers, and Kubernetes platforms using intelligent automation. Built on an open source core, Kong's solutions enable digital innovation by allowing organizations to reliably and securely manage the full lifecycle of APIs for legacy as well as modern architectures, including container runtimes and serverless technologies. With unprecedented architectural freedom, Kong accelerates innovation cycles, increases productivity, and seamlessly bridges legacy and modern systems and applications.

Kong Gateway Enterprise is now validated to run on Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA), AWS Graviton processors, and AWS Bottlerocket OS.

Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS

Kong Gateway and Kong Konnect alike are both validated with Red Hat Openshift Service on AWS (ROSA).

ROSA is an AWS and Red Hat co-engineered and managed OpenShift platform running as a native, first-class AWS service. ROSA provides self-service provisioning, automatic security enforcement, and accelerates your time to the cloud by eliminating the need to manage OpenShift yourself.

For Kong, it's a natural evolution to provide validated solutions on a managed Kubernetes platform such as ROSA. Now you’re guaranteed the same architectural freedom and choice on ROSA when running Kong Gateway or Kong Konnect on the platform.

By combining Kong Konnect and ROSA, you get a fully managed SaaS platform to streamline and secure both your APIs and applications in the cloud.

AWS Graviton Processor

AWS Graviton processors are Arm-based and custom built by AWS for cloud native workloads. AWS Graviton3 processors, the latest in the AWS Graviton processor family, provide up to 25% better compute performance compared to AWS Graviton2 processors.

As an APN advanced tier partner, Kong had the opportunity to benchmark the Graviton3-based c7g EC2 instances. It demonstrated a performance increase of 25% when compared to C6i EC2 instances with multiple Kong Gateway plugins and 2 pods.

Kong Gateway Enterprise 3.0.0 with OpenID Connect and Rate Limiting Advanced plugins

The next generation Graviton processors delivered a major leap in performance and capabilities over the C6i instances. In summary, the Graviton based processors can offer significant cost savings for Kong customers.

AWS Bottlerocket

AWS Bottlerocket OS is a Linux-based open-source operating system that is purpose-built by Amazon Web Services for running containerized workloads. Kong Gateway Enterprise is certified on AWS Bottlerocket.

By running Kong Gateway on Bottlerocket OS using either EC2 instances or Amazon EKS Clusters, you can take advantage of its impressive capabilities including:

  • Built-in integrations with AWS services for container orchestration, container registries, and observability
  • Streamlined, all in one operating system and software updates
  • Lower management overhead and operational costs: updates to Bottlerocket can be automated using Amazon EKS and the Bottlerocket Update Operator

The image above displays the Vitals from a Kong deployment on Amazon EKS with a configuration of three Kubernetes pods during a Bottlerocket OS upgrade. The Kong Gateway cluster continues to operate even as the Bottlerocket nodes are upgraded with a new version of the operating system using the Bottlerocket Update Operator.

For more information, visit Kong booth #3816 at the AWS re:Invent expo hall or join Kong's session on cloud migration journey on Nov. 30 at 7 p.m. at the Wynn