Opening Keynote (Part 1): Making Connectivity Invisible, Like Electricity

CEO & Co-Founder Augusto Marietti kicks off Kong Summit 2021 with a discussion on connectivity as we know it today, the challenges of hyper-connectivity and how Kong is creating a future where connectivity is invisible just like electricity — always running, always reliable.

Opening Keynote (Part 1): Making Connectivity Invisible, Like Electricity_Aghi Marietti_FINAL.mp4
Speaker1: Welcome everyone to Kong Summit 2021. Thanks to our partners, to our community. This is the largest we ever done with all of you. Let’s take a look at how far we have come together. First of all, impressive registrations. Over four thousand people from eighty seven countries and seventy five speakers today are going to share with us thought leaders around API connectivity and decentralized architectures. But before we go there, I want to thank you. All the people, the customers, the partners, they made Kong what it is today and most of all, getting to this explosive growth that we have witnessed the last year. We went from one hundred and seventy to three hundred and forty Kongers. We raised over one hundred and seventy million in total funding. And we have now operating across twenty nine countries. Not only that, we move from a single open source project to over four mainstream open source projects from API Gateway to Kuma Service Mesh to Insomnia API client and the Sign and Kong Ingress controller. Last but not least, we became a leader in the API management quadrant. But not just the leader, the fastest to leader that the quadrant ever experience and the most visionary. That’s thanks to all our customers that have shared with us the vision of service connectivity. This is unprecedented and it has never happened in the 10 years of the history of this quadrant. So I want to thank all of us that have shared this journey together. We have now over four hundred enterprise customers, and hundreds of those are from global 2000s. They come from all over the place, all the way to Abu Dhabi, to United States, to South America, to Europe, to APJ.Speaker1: It’s a global phenomenon. API connectivity, it’s a wave that is coming all over the world. Any vertical. You are all in great company. And how all it flourish, it start with the community. We have now over a hundred thousand members that have downloaded three hundred million, all the Kong tools and projects. We have done over 50 meet ups and we’ve been CNCF members since 2017. And next week we have something crazy to announce. Kongcast, the first ever broadcast about API connectivity. We’re going to interview top leader, great software engineers. They’re going to be on top of their game and share the best practice for service connectivity across the edge or really any kind of use case you can think about. We can also give you the tools and strategy to take your organization to the next level. And so we want to give back. We want to give back a little bit and our gift, it’s Kong Academy. We just launched last week a structural training. We have Kong certifications. We have learning labs that allows you both in virtual or in person to become a pro on all things Kong. So let’s celebrate how far we’ve come. But we’re not in a sprint. It’s a marathon. So now let’s go and talk about the future of our industry, and let’s see how Kong is positioning it for you and for your teams and for your organization to help you develop the connected world. Let’s check it out.

Speaker2: At the dawn of the 19th century, we were propelled into a new age from stinking stacks of acid and metal. We were able to harness and control the most primal force of nature. A thousand spectacular experiments to turn on a single light bulb. All in the name of taming lightning itself. Maverick genius lit up our cities. Established modern industry and allowed us to send messages to loved ones across the seas and through the air. What was once a cold, dark and quiet world was suddenly electrified and connected. This connection now stands at attention like a dedicated soldier in the background of our lives. Invisible, unyielding and seamless. Thankfully, we found that lightning can strike in the same place more than twice. A lot more. And our obsession with connection keeps us charging onward. Because after all, at the flip of a switch, we can turn on the world.

Speaker1: That’s right. Making connectivity invisible like electricity. That’s how we think about it when we develop our own connected world. So where did it all start? It started from 2002 when a mandate was sent out across the company and the mandate was about having every single engineer from now on consuming service through a service interface. That 2002 mandate sent a big wave in the industry, and it did create cloud computing as we know it today. And that was Jeff Bezos sending them on date across all Amazon, while it was experiencing massive growth and it had to accelerate their pace of innovation. They had to accelerate the way they were building reliable architectures, and that mandate allowed Amazon to grow at an even faster pace. And so what’s happened since then? What happened is since 2002, on one side, we have seen it, an increasing amounts of services. But what that creates, it increases the workloads over network traffic from layer four to layer seven. This is a proliferation from hundreds to thousands of services and even millions or billions of services that were going into and how all these connections run all your architectures. It’s really becoming the key things, how we keep them reliable, how we keep them secure, how we keep them organized, all those connectivity lines that you see. This is the wave that is coming at us. And so where do you think we are in the journey? You think we’re already there? 2002 was almost 20 years ago. We’re not there, we’re just here. Look at what’s coming. How are we going to manage millions of connections across our companies, how we build our connected worlds, is going to make or break our organizations, and we’re just at the beginning. All this massive wave that is coming at us, it creates all sorts of new challenges. And I want to talk to you about three main challenges off hyperconnected enterprises. Number one, it’s really about reliability, how we keep those connections always reliable, always available, anywhere, any time. Number two, it’s about security. We care about our privacy. We want all this data moving through API requests to be secure, to be encrypt, to be safe. Number three, it’s about observability, how we keep those connections, military base, always observable, so we know what’s happening exactly when it’s happening, where it’s happening, so we can build a very reliable service connectivity platforms. And so we have to look a little bit back to what is in our great discovery of our time that kind of propel us human society forward. That was electricity. And I think how we can solve a lot of the challenges ahead, it’s really getting to know how we solve our problems when electricity went mainstream in our society. And so we can learn a lot about solving our challenges. It was really 1920 where electricity started to go mainstream and we started to build electrical networks, but it all started in 1831, the first electric generator. From there, electric was still very hard to manage, hard to store, hard to connect, was not safe, was not secure. Thiele, 100 years later, built alternate current generators that allowed us to move from direct current to alternate currents and alternate currents allowed us to manipulate and manage electricity at a much safer place. But not only that, it allows us to move electricity far, far away. And he created a decentralized electrical grid. So all these transmission lines that we see when we drive, when we fly, they are possible thanks to those latest innovations that happened like alternate currents. But it created a pretty complex electrical networks, a pretty complex system. It created what we call electrical grid. And so those electrical grids, they go from power plants to transmission to us, the consumers of those. And that allows us to produce even more energy and move it wherever we want. So we got power stations, we got substations, we got power distribution, security grid network. And it all looks like it’s working great, right? Until blackouts happen, power outages happen. Even the most sophisticated cities, they do experience that. This is a picture for only two years ago. The electrical grids, they’re not 100 percent reliable if something happens, if the tsunami happens, those transmission lines might fall down and we could turn into a blackout. So how do we make sure that this doesn’t happen into our organizations, because there is a lot of similarities. Well, here in the latest of the years, we invented the smart grid. That’s the big idea. The smart grid. It brought intelligence, it brought reliability. It brought security into the electrical grids. And so in the traditional sense, regular electrical systems, they’re just built top-down. They move electricity from top to bottom. If something goes off, you have power outages. It’s not smart. It can only go one dimension. Smart grid are decentralized, are multidimensional. They can store electricity when you need it, when you don’t need it, and take it back when you need it. They can have smart routing so if one route is not working well, it can route to some other transmission lines that are working better, and it can take energy from any single source whether that is wind, nuclear, or solar. And also, we as a consumer, we become part of this migrate on our own houses, we can produce back in energy into the system. So that creates a very massive smart electrical grid that is also safe and is always running. So let’s zoom in into the main components of the smart grids. On the top, you see that control plane where you can build switch routers, you can design them, you have the management system, you have metering to see what’s happening no matter if energy is coming from a battery, from a transmissions, no matter is alternate, current or direct current, no matter is a centralized system or a decentralized system. Those are the main components of this smart grid. Only a few countries and places are starting to use at large technologies like the smart grid, but thanks to that, they’re becoming much more efficient in consumption. They’re always reliable and they don’t get power outages.

So how we can connect that concept into our own enterprises? Well, if you look at those components, there is not much difference from what a service connectivity platform is. You have your control plane where you can design and test your APIs. You have the management plane. You can you govern those APIs. You can inject in that intelligence, you can inject security or all sorts of runtimes, regardless if it is a Kong gateway, Kuma mesh, it’s Ingress controllers. Any kind of protocols and really any use case of service connectivity. It can be API led connectivity, it can be mesh connectivity, Ingress connectivity between apps at the edge. It doesn’t matter. What that smart grid was doing to electricity, that’s how we have to think about the service connectivity platforms. And so with that, this is what we mean when we say make connectivity invisible like electricity. That’s exactly what Kong today and to our journey is on a mission force, to make sure that we give the products and the tools and we’re going to learn exciting new announcements. Practical use cases, will have a fireside chat with the CIO and CTO of Nasdaq, Brad, later on, to really show you how we can build reliable grids that can run anywhere, any time because Kong really wants to allow you to finally develop your connected world without worrying about service connectivity.

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