DEVOPSdigest

Kong announced that its open source platform will support service mesh deployments.

Offering lightweight processes, reduced latency and faster performance, the new service mesh capabilities will enable Kong users to better manage increased East-West network traffic within their microservice-oriented architectures. Users will have the flexibility to use Kong as a standalone service mesh or to integrate it with service mesh players such as Istio and others in the ecosystem.

As organizations increasingly transition towards flexible, scalable and reusable microservices, they create more network traffic as services access one another through APIs over the network. Traditional API gateways were designed to sit at the edge of the data path in between a client and a monolith, where the latency they introduced had little impact. Now, microservices and service mesh architectures are held together by APIs, and processing latency associated with increased traffic between services can become unacceptably high with traditional gateways.

Kong designed its platform to handle modern deployment patterns, enabled by the advent of containers, to address the increased traffic and latency. Where older API management platforms may introduce about 200 milliseconds of processing latency between services in a container ecosystem, Kong creates less than 10 milliseconds of delay. The flexibility provided by Kong's plugin architecture further enhances latency performance by removing unnecessary functionality and supporting seamless integrations with ecosystem participants.

"Kong is the best API management platform to address the challenges of data in-flight in distributed architectures because we designed it to be lightweight, low latency, extensible and deployment-agnostic," said Marco Palladino, co-founder and CTO of Kong. "Older API solutions can't keep up as the topology of network traffic changes from external to largely internal. Top enterprises trust Kong, and DevOps teams have made it the most popular open source API gateway because it's ideally suited to supporting both legacy and modern architectures. No other platform can deliver on this promise."