September 2020 Summaries

Kong has made significant advancements in the Full Lifecycle API Management Market, transitioning from being recognized as a Visionary in the Gartner Magic Quadrant in 2018 to being named a Leader in 2020. This progression highlights Kong's alignment with customer challenges, market understanding, product fit, and operational capabilities. The company boasts over 200 million downloads of its open-source Kong Gateway and supports more than 250 enterprise customers, including major corporations like GE and Samsung. Kong's solutions facilitate reliable and secure API and microservice connectivity across various environments such as clouds, Kubernetes, and data centers. The recognition in the Magic Quadrant reflects Kong's comprehensive capabilities in building, managing, marketing, and selling its products. For further insights, the full report is available on Kong's website, and the Kong Summit 2020 is set to explore cloud adoption and connectivity strategies.

Kuma, an Envoy-based service mesh now part of the CNCF, is designed to operate seamlessly across various clusters, clouds, and applications, catering to the diverse architecture needs of large organizations. With the introduction of advanced multi-zone capabilities in version 0.6, Kuma supports integration across every cloud vendor, architecture, and platform, enabling automatic service discovery and connectivity in hybrid infrastructures. This feature allows Kuma to manage multiple isolated meshes within the same cluster, enhancing security and reducing operational costs by negating the need for multiple service mesh clusters. Its architecture includes global and remote control planes, utilizing Envoy xDS and Kuma Discovery Service (KDS) over gRPC for consistent communication across service mesh infrastructure. This setup ensures high availability and disaster recovery by enabling cross-zone communication and connectivity, facilitated by features like a built-in DNS service discovery and a new ingress data plane proxy mode. Kuma's approach simplifies the deployment and management of service meshes in complex environments, making it suitable for diverse enterprise and distributed settings.