Businesses are transforming the way they develop their critical applications. Instead of developing monolithic applications on servers or virtual machines, developers are turning to containers and microservices. This paradigm shift provides enormous benefits for companies. It increases agility and time to market while providing consistent deployments. The greatest challenge engineering teams face with the new architecture is visibility.
Kong developed Kong Konnect to respond to the challenges of managing a catalog of microservices. Konnect enables engineers to track and deploy microservices from a single pane of glass management plane. We recently sat down with Kong to discuss Kong Konnect and how critical it is to engineering teams.
Visibility and Management in the Era of Microservices
Visibility into the development environment is not a new problem. For over twelve years, we have been striving to understand exactly which services we offer and how they interact. The approach is different, but the challenge is still front and center. As application architecture shifts from three-tier servers to microservices, someone has to track these and their interactions.
Typical documentation involves static, manual spreadsheets, but they require human intervention. A developer can deploy a new service, forget to update the spreadsheet, and nobody on the engineering team will know about it. The lack of visibility is a risk to application stability and manageability that engineering teams need to solve.
Kong Mesh: Enterprise Ready Service Mesh
Kong started as an open-source net generation API gateway. They lead to the forefront by supporting containers from the start. Their cloud-native, low footprint approach allowed them to build an ecosystem around API management in a cloud-native world. They saw the industry’s demand for decentralized services and developed Kong Mesh. Kong Mesh allows the Kong ecosystem to extend from the API gateway into a mesh and sidecar methodology. Not only is Kong Mesh Kubernetes aware, but it also integrates with VMs, allowing multi-cloud integration into any environment. The service mesh solved problems for developers but introduced a new opportunity to solve the services’ manageability and operations in the mesh.
Kong Konnect: Enterprise Management for Shadow IT
Many enterprise developers use Kong solutions today, whether the engineering team knows it or not. Between the API Gateway and Kong Mesh, developers can control their applications and service meshes across the cloud and on-premises infrastructure. Careful documentation can keep this under control, though without discipline, it can quickly devolve into chaos.
Kong Konnect is a central management solution that provides visibility of the entire Kong environment and service catalog capabilities for every microservice deployed and managed by Kong. Kong Konnect’s ServiceHub provides a single source of truth for every service in the environment and enables developers to deploy new services using the same declarative code. It also provides a runtime manager to automate the deployment of Kong Gateway, Kong Mesh, and the Kong Ingress Controller, which manages connectivity between applications and Kubernetes. Kong supports multi-stack protocols, so it is adaptable to any application in the environment, and Kong Konnect can manage them all in a single pane of glass.
May will mark the release of Kong Konnect Plus. Konnect Plus revolutionizes enterprise mesh management software by providing a shift in the payment method. It is the first service of its kind to unlock every enterprise feature via a credit card purchase. It can be purchased monthly or with annual commitments, allowing for budgeting flexibility. Of course, it is also available through traditional enterprise procurement methods as well. Kong wants to meet their customers where they are and understands a cloud-native solution deserves cloud-native purchasing methods. The Kong ecosystem tells an intriguing story for enterprise organizations. The developers are using their technology to streamline deployments and manage their applications, and Kong Konnect allows infrastructure engineers to control the chaos and manage a modern, multi-cloud infrastructure.
Learn More
You can see all that Kong Konnect and Konnect Plus offer to the enterprise by checking out their website. In the meantime, you’ll find more exclusive insights into the enterprise IT industry here at GestaltIT.com.
