DEVOPSdigest

Kong announced the release of Kong Gateway 3.8, a major update that sets a new standard for API management.

This release delivers significant enhancements in performance, security and AI capabilities, making it easier than ever for organizations to manage, secure and optimize their API ecosystems. Kong Gateway 3.8 introduces Incremental Configuration Sync, a groundbreaking feature that drastically reduces memory and CPU usage by transmitting only relevant configuration changes. This leads to faster processing, lower resource contention and a more efficient API management experience, allowing businesses to scale their operations without compromising performance.

"Kong Gateway 3.8 is a leap forward in how organizations can manage and secure their APIs," said Reza Shafii, senior vice president, product management at Kong Inc. "We’ve listened to our users’ and customers’ needs, and delivered a solution that not only enhances performance but also fortifies security and accelerates AI adoption."

Key Features and Benefits of Kong Gateway 3.8:

- Faster Configuration Processing: Incremental Configuration Sync ensures only the necessary changes are sent from the control plane to the data plane, resulting in quicker configuration updates and reduced resource usage. This leads to a more responsive API management experience.

- Enhanced Security: New plugins, including JSON Threat Protection and header-cert-auth, offer robust protection for APIs by enforcing content inspection policies and supporting mutual certificate-based authentication (mTLS) even in complex deployment patterns. These features help safeguard APIs from potential threats and ensure secure connections.

- Advanced AI Integration: Our updated AI Gateway now features semantic intelligence, introducing Semantic Prompt Guard, Semantic Caching and Semantic Routing. These enhancements can dramatically improve GenAI performance, reduce computational overhead and enhance security for large language models (LLMs).

- Comprehensive Observability: With OpenTelemetry, Kong Gateway 3.8 allows for the collection and export of detailed telemetry data, including logs, metrics and traces. This enhanced observability enables deeper insights into API performance, facilitating more effective monitoring, troubleshooting, and optimization.

- Streamlined API Management via Kong Konnect: The new Konnect Config Store provides a centralized, cloud-based repository for managing API configurations, reducing operational overhead, and ensuring consistency across multiple data planes. This feature lowers the total cost of ownership and simplifies vendor management. Further, the new Konnect Vault feature enables Kong Konnect deployed Kong Gateways to leverage a Konnect supplied and hosted secret management thus saving the need for the independent management of a 3rd party secret manager.

"With Kong Gateway 3.8, we continue to push the boundaries of what’s possible in API management," Shafii said. "This release not only addresses the current challenges of managing and securing APIs at scale but also lays the groundwork for the next generation of AI-powered applications."