December 2023 Summaries

In 2023, Kong Inc. achieved significant milestones, surpassing $100 million in annual recurring revenue, which is a rare feat for companies. The year saw the launch of Kong Konnect, a unified API management platform capable of managing services like API gateways, Ingress Controllers, and service meshes under one cloud management plane. The company highlighted the projected global economic impact of APIs, estimated at $14.2 trillion by 2027, emphasizing the importance of API security. At the API Summit 2023, discussions centered on the future impact of AI and APIs on enterprises, featuring notable speakers like Marco Palladino and Martin Casado. Kong received accolades from Gartner, GigaOm, and Forbes, recognizing its leadership in API management and service mesh solutions. The company expanded its global presence by opening an office in Singapore and partnering with Japan Cloud to establish a subsidiary in Tokyo, further cementing its international growth strategy.

APIs are integral to modern digital infrastructure but also present significant security challenges, necessitating a multi-layered security approach to mitigate threats like DDoS attacks, data breaches, malware, and injections. This comprehensive strategy involves implementing several layers of security, including low-level network security (L3/L4), zero-trust frameworks, service mesh architecture, and robust API authentication and authorization protocols. These layers work in tandem to validate traffic legitimacy, manage certificate lifecycles, enforce centralized authentication policies, and monitor for anomalies using analytics and machine learning. Additionally, policy enforcement is crucial in maintaining security integrity, requiring approval processes to prevent human error and ensuring compliance. This layered security model not only protects sensitive data but also addresses the rising frequency and cost of API attacks, making it essential for organizations aiming to safeguard their API infrastructure effectively.

The Gorilla Project is an initiative aiming to enhance how Large Language Models (LLMs) interact with the world by integrating them more effectively with APIs, as presented by PhD student Shishir Patel and his team at UC Berkeley and Microsoft researchers at API Summit 2023. The project seeks to address the limitations of current AI systems, which often rely on static data, by allowing LLMs to interact directly with APIs for real-time, accurate information retrieval, thereby reducing user dependency and AI hallucinations. By using a method called Retrieval Awareness Training (RAT), Gorilla enhances LLMs' ability to select and utilize the correct APIs for given tasks, significantly improving the accuracy and reducing hallucinations compared to other models like GPT 3.5. Despite its promising results and growing user base, the project faces challenges such as handling API failures and maintaining context across interactions, which the developers are actively working to overcome. Ultimately, the Gorilla Project aims to create a more seamless and efficient user experience by allowing LLMs to autonomously select, invoke, and execute APIs, paving the way for future advancements in AI technology.

Standard Webhooks has been launched in collaboration with Kong and a consortium of companies, including Svix, Ngrok, Zapier, Twilio, Lob, Mux, and Supabase, aiming to standardize the way webhooks are implemented across the industry. Webhooks, which function as HTTP callbacks enabling service notifications, face challenges due to fragmented implementations that vary in quality and compatibility, leading to consumer and provider friction. The initiative seeks to provide a set of open-source guidelines and libraries to ensure secure and easy integration of webhooks, promoting a consistent and efficient developer experience. This standardization effort is crucial for reducing the need for bespoke solutions, improving innovation, and facilitating smoother server-to-server communication. Kong, already utilizing webhooks in its audit-logging features, supports this effort to streamline development processes and reduce consumer friction, planning to integrate the standard into its offerings like Kong Konnect, Kong Gateway, and Kuma.

Kong has achieved a significant milestone by surpassing $100 million in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), a feat that only 4% of companies reaching $10 million ARR accomplish. Originating from a modest beginning in Milan with founders surviving on minimal resources while networking and pitching in San Francisco, Kong has grown into a leading entity in the expansive API market. The company, which spun out from Mashape in 2017, capitalizes on industry trends such as cloud computing, microservices, and AI proliferation to fuel its expansion. Its suite of products, including Kong Konnect and Kong Mesh, is widely adopted by developers and enterprises globally. The founders attribute Kong's success to its team and customers, maintaining a vision for continued innovation in API technologies. In celebration of their success, Kong adopted a gorilla for each employee through the WWF, underscoring their commitment to environmental conservation.

The Kong Konnect EKS Marketplace add-on simplifies the deployment and management of Kong Gateway dataplanes on AWS, offering a streamlined process through AWS's existing tooling ecosystem. It provides a centralized configuration for EKS software components, reducing the need for multiple tools and facilitating seamless upgrades with notifications for new versions. This add-on, part of a broader set of Amazon EKS add-ons, is designed to enhance the operational functionality of Kubernetes clusters by integrating essential software components like gateways. The integration allows users to manage Kong Gateway dataplanes without leaving the AWS environment, with the add-on being free with Kong Konnect. Additionally, it supports automation through AWS CLI, Terraform, and CloudFormation, providing flexibility for users to manage their infrastructure as code.

In October 2023, Kong set a new record by hosting 11 Meetups worldwide, demonstrating the extensive global utilization of its platform, which handles 400 billion API calls daily. With 81 Meetup groups and over 17,000 members globally, the Kong community offers opportunities for users to network, share knowledge, and engage with Kong-related technology. Notably, the Hyderabad Meetup Group, in collaboration with Zelarsoft, is thriving with its fourth event scheduled for December 1, featuring presentations on Kuma Service Mesh and networking sessions. Meanwhile, the Bengaluru Meetup on December 16, in partnership with Verifone, will conclude the year with talks on Kong Gateway Custom Plugin Development and troubleshooting, followed by networking opportunities. These events highlight the vibrant and expanding community of Kong users and the platform's commitment to fostering connections and knowledge-sharing across diverse locations.

Kong Mesh has been recognized as a Leader and Outperformer in the 2023 GigaOm Radar for Service Mesh report, highlighting its commitment to innovation and ease of use. The GigaOm Radar report provides actionable insights for IT decision-makers by focusing on forward-looking solutions rather than market share, and places top performers in the "Leaders circle." Kong Mesh extends the capabilities of the open-source Kuma project into an enterprise-ready solution, offering features such as ease of use, built-in automation, FIPS 140-2 compliance, and 24/7 support. Its "run anywhere" philosophy allows it to support workloads across various platforms without added complexity, enhancing service connectivity and developer efficiency. Kong Mesh is integrated with Kong Konnect, providing a unified platform for API management, service mesh, and ingress control, helping organizations drive compelling digital experiences with improved security and regulatory compliance.

ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, is being explored as a tool to modernize APIs by creating OpenAPI specifications for existing APIs with documentation. This effort aims to address challenges faced by legacy APIs, such as lack of standardized documentation and versioning, which can hinder maintenance and adoption. OpenAPI specifications, defined by the OpenAPI Initiative, offer a standardized, machine-readable format that enhances consistency, allows for documentation and versioning, and facilitates quicker development and adoption of APIs. In the context of this exploration, the API "Where the ISS at?" which provides data about the International Space Station, is used as a case study. The documentation for this API is accessible via the Wayback Machine in case the main site becomes unavailable. The full details of the ChatGPT interactions for generating an OpenAPI specification can be found on GitHub, illustrating how ChatGPT can streamline the process of updating API documentation to meet modern standards.