DEVOPSdigest

Kong announced the introduction of the Kong Event Gateway as a part of their unified API platform.

With Kong Event Gateway, platform and Event-Driven Architecture (EDA) teams can bring event APIs and real-time data into their API platforms–enabling developers to expose, manage, and secure real-time event streams from Apache Kafka® as Konnect-managed APIs and services.

With this release, Kong is helping to reduce the cost and complexity of managing Kafka, making it easier for organizations to unlock the full potential of event streams. Now, platform architects will have one unified workspace for managing and designing access to events and APIs.

"The ability to process real-time event data is imperative to many organizations, particularly in the financial, IoT and e-commerce space. We're bringing the same governance, observability and security capabilities our customers leverage for APIs, microservices and AI to events," said Marco Palladino, CTO and Co-Founder, Kong Inc.

With Event Gateway, Kong is adding eventing support to Kong Konnect, the unified API platform, enabling teams to discover, observe, and govern event streams alongside LLM APIs, REST APIs, and any other supported service types in the Kong platform.

With Kong Event Gateway customers will be able to:

- Unify the API and Eventing Developer Experience: Platform and product teams can expose and apply policies to Kafka event streams just like they do APIs, reducing complexity and enabling robust governance.

- Create APIs and services that expose Kafka resources: expose Kafka as HTTP APIs or as native Kafka services that communicate over the Kafka protocol. The native Kafka proxy option is currently in early access, and you can learn more here.

- Optimize Kafka Infrastructure Costs: Kong can help reduce the infrastructure costs associated with running Kafka through virtualizing clusters and topics – allowing multiple teams to safely and reliably share Kafka clusters.

- Build Data Products for Easier Consumption and/or Monetization: Customers can more confidently productize and expose event streams as monetized API data products for internal and external use.

- Strengthen Security & Compliance: Implement consistent role-based access control, authorization and encryption across both APIs and events.

- Move more Events Driven Architecture (EDA) Workloads to the Cloud: Encryption will allow teams to move more EDA workloads into cloud-based versions of Kafka by enforcing a standard and centralized mechanism for handling encrypted data across clients.

Event Gateway will be available as part of Kong Konnect, the unified API platform purpose-built to power API-driven innovation at scale. As context, APIs remain a complex challenge if they aren't high-quality, secure, discoverable, performant, and resilient. Konnect addresses this directly by enabling organizations to equip every engineering team with a unified, self-serve workspace to build, run, discover, consume, and govern APIs that drive traditional REST API, microservices, AI, and event streaming innovation.