August 2020 Summaries

Kong Enterprise 2.1 has been released, introducing significant changes to how users can deploy, manage, and scale their systems with the new "Hybrid Mode" feature, which simplifies large-scale deployments across hybrid and multi-cloud environments by allowing data plane instances to run across various data centers without a unified Cassandra deployment. This version also includes enhanced capabilities such as a general availability version of App Registration, which supports any OIDC-compliant identity provider and enables API consumers to self-serve access in the Dev Portal, and Golang PDK support for building plugins in the Golang programming language, broadening the developer ecosystem. Additionally, Kong Vitals' enhanced reporting features allow for more comprehensive metrics analysis and report generation. These improvements, along with other enhancements, aim to increase security, performance, and ease of use for Kong Enterprise customers.

Kong's technology played a significant role in helping Papa John's achieve its highest sales in company history by enhancing their digital consumer experience and implementing a comprehensive API strategy for partner integrations. Papa John's, known for its menu innovation and delicious offerings, recognized the importance of seamless ordering experiences and partnered with third-party delivery services to reach customers effectively. By integrating Kong's connectivity platform, Papa John's streamlined its partner API integrations, significantly reducing the time required for such developments and allowing the engineering team to focus on delivering business value. This digital transformation enabled Papa John's to quickly adapt to the demands of the COVID era, notably becoming the first pizza company to fully integrate no-contact delivery into its digital channels, leading to unprecedented sales achievements.

Tracing in complex service mesh systems is essential for understanding the flow and timing of requests that span multiple internal entities, which cannot be effectively captured by traditional logging plugins. Kong's Zipkin plugin addresses these needs by collecting structured timing data compatible with HTTP/HTTPS and stream traffic. This data is organized into spans and traces, facilitating the debugging of timing-related issues and providing insights into multi-service environments. A basic setup using Docker and Docker-compose involves deploying a Zipkin server, along with HTTP and TCP Echo services, and a db-less Kong instance, configured through a declarative file. The process of tracing involves using Kong to proxy requests and then analyzing the resulting traces in the Zipkin UI, which displays detailed timing information for each request. While HTTP traffic supports tracing headers like x-b3-traceid, TCP traffic does not, highlighting the plugin's capability to manage different traffic types within a service infrastructure.

Kong Mesh 1.0 is Kong's first enterprise service mesh, designed to facilitate modern application deployment across Kubernetes, VMs, and various cloud or data-center environments. Built on Kuma and Envoy, it aims to simplify and scale service connectivity for organizations by leveraging Kuma's unique features, supporting multi-mesh environments, and offering cross-cluster and cross-cloud connectivity. As businesses transition to microservices for innovation and cost efficiency, Kong Mesh addresses challenges like reliable service connectivity, zero-trust security, and global traffic observability. It offers a turn-key deployment with a unified control plane, enabling efficient policy application and reducing operational costs. Kong Mesh integrates seamlessly with the Kong Enterprise platform, providing full stack connectivity and API lifecycle management, while maintaining an open-source foundation through CNCF technologies, ensuring organizations have full control over their technology stack.