February 2019 Summaries

In the modern SaaS environment, observability is crucial for software reliability, with application monitoring categorized into white box and black box monitoring. White box monitoring provides internal visibility through application instrumentation, while black box monitoring treats applications as opaque entities, observing their external interactions. This guide details setting up black box monitoring on Kubernetes using Prometheus and Grafana, with Kong as the Ingress Controller to uniformly collect metrics for all services. It outlines the installation of Prometheus and Grafana via Helm, enabling the Prometheus plugin in Kong, and setting up Ingress routing for services to proxy traffic. The guide emphasizes monitoring metrics like request latencies, error rates, and bandwidth consumption, using queries in Prometheus to gain insights and alert on performance issues. The setup provides a comprehensive view of service health and paves the way for utilizing Kong's other functionalities such as authentication and load balancing.

Kong 1.0 introduces support for TCP traffic, allowing users to manage various types of non-HTTP traffic, such as email and file transfers, through its platform. This expansion to layer 4 of the OSI model is part of Kong's effort to provide a versatile service mesh that can connect services across any infrastructure and language. It leverages OpenResty's stream support to allow users to handle TCP traffic, with features like TLS termination using Kong's Server Name Indication (SNI) and certificate entities. Although TCP plugin support is in its early stages, users can create custom plugins to extend functionality. The stream_listen configuration option enables users to specify where Kong should listen for TCP traffic, and services can be configured for either TCP or TLS protocols. Future enhancements include configurable TLS termination on a per-route basis and expanded support for TCP data in the Kong Plugin Development Kit (PDK). Users interested in TCP support are encouraged to engage with the Kong community for guidance and collaboration.