December 2018 Summaries

Kong Cloud has re-engineered its metrics pipeline to improve performance and cost-effectiveness by using OpenResty to send metrics to Prometheus, enabling effective monitoring of high traffic volumes with reduced compute power. By decoupling the metrics and logging infrastructure, the systems can scale independently. The architecture leverages both push and pull models, with Prometheus primarily utilizing the pull model, complemented by an edge logger that uses Lua code to collect and push metrics to an edge exporter. Metrics are stored and processed in local memory, with aggregation challenges addressed by avoiding shared memory contention, ultimately employing a combination of foreign function interface (FFI) and LuaJIT for optimized performance. The edge exporter functions similarly to a Pushgateway, translating metrics received from OpenResty worker processes into Prometheus-compatible formats. This design, which updates metrics periodically and skips zero-value metrics, ensures efficiency and reduces the load on Prometheus while maintaining statelessness and ease of maintenance.

Kong 1.0 marks a significant milestone for the open-source microservice API gateway by introducing a host of new features that enhance its scalability, flexibility, and resilience, while ensuring backward compatibility. The release broadens its utility through service mesh support, allowing Kong to function as a standalone service-mesh proxy with integrated plugins for enhanced visibility and security, and introduces mutual TLS and TCP routing capabilities for improved traffic management across hybrid and cloud-native architectures. The update also includes primitive gRPC support, a new Database Abstraction Object for seamless migrations, and a Plugin Development Kit that ensures compatibility and ease of plugin development. Additionally, Kong 1.0 offers separate control and data plane configurations, allowing more secure and efficient large-scale deployments, and includes performance improvements for plugins and interactions with AWS Lambda and Azure FaaS. The release is a testament to the contributions of the Kong community and sets the stage for further development towards supporting emerging ecosystems and maintaining a robust platform for diverse deployment scenarios.