DEVOPSdigest

Kong announced the launch of the latest version of Kong Konnect, the API platform for the AI era.

Kong Konnect is an enterprise-grade unified platform that enables them to securely build, run, and govern API and GenAI applications. The platform provides a comprehensive solution for managing the entire API lifecycle, from development to deployment, with a focus on performance, security, governance, and cost efficiency.

With this update, Kong Konnect introduces advanced functionality to prepare your API infrastructure for the AI era. New features include a de facto system of record for all APIs to supply a central building-blocks repository for GenAI agents. This also offers enhanced visibility and control over shadow APIs, faster API configuration updates to improve operational efficiency, centralized management for API discovery, configuration and sensitive data, as well as enhanced tools for integrating with large language models (LLMs) to help accelerate GenAI adoption. Additionally, Konnect adds improved support with AI Gateway, and Insomnia launches the first AI runner.

"There is no AI without APIs, and the latest version of Kong Konnect delivers the essential infrastructure for both. We aim to give businesses the tools to manage and scale their API traffic securely, helping drive innovation faster than ever before," said Augusto Marietti, CEO and co-founder of Kong Inc. "Kong Konnect provides a unified API platform for building, running and governing GenAI applications."

Key new features of Kong Konnect include:

- Konnect Service Catalog: Provides developers with a single source of truth, which enables stronger management of Shadow APIs in IT infrastructure. Many organizations struggle with a lack of visibility leading to undiscovered and unmanaged APIs, opening them up to potential risks. Service Catalog addresses those potential risks by integrating with various systems—such as API and AI gateways, service meshes, and Kubernetes – to provide comprehensive visibility into all APIs and services. This added visibility allows organizations to proactively mitigate vulnerabilities by eliminating undiscovered or unused APIs within an organization's ecosystem. The capability also introduces Service Catalog's Scorecards, which enables users to identify which services aren't compliant with defined criteria allowing platform teams to track and enforce organization-wide compliance.

- Konnect Dedicated Cloud Gateways on AWS and now Azure: Kong's fully managed, multi-region API management solution is now available on Azure and additional AWS regions, ensuring high-performance API infrastructure globally. This expansion ensures that organizations can deploy and manage APIs across multiple clouds with enterprise-grade SLAs, reducing the operational burden and allowing teams to focus on innovation rather than infrastructure.

- Kong Gateway 3.8: Kong's cloud-native gateway introduces two major updates: Incremental Configuration Updates and enhanced OpenTelemetry support. With Incremental Configuration Updates, users benefit from dramatically reduced memory and CPU usage, improving efficiency and responsiveness. Enhanced OpenTelemetry provides better observability, setting a new standard for efficient, secure and scalable API operations.

- AI Gateway 3.8: This update introduces groundbreaking semantic capabilities to enhance AI and API infrastructure. This new version includes Semantic Caching, which accelerates AI responses by up to 20x while reducing computational overhead, making GenAI applications faster and more cost-effective. It also features Semantic Prompt Guard, ensuring robust security by intelligently blocking inappropriate prompts, and Semantic Routing, which simplifies AI model selection for developers. AI Gateway 3.8 provides enterprises with improved customer engagement, optimized costs, and comprehensive security, positioning it as a leader in GenAI infrastructure.

- Kong Insomnia 10: Kong's API design and testing tool introduces powerful new features that elevate developer productivity, API quality, and security. The latest version includes unlimited collection runs and AI Runner, which offers seamless GenAI development with multi-LLM support and up to 20x faster performance through semantic caching. Insomnia 10 also enhances collaboration with new enterprise-level security features like Invite Control, ensuring that API assets are protected and accessible only to authorized users.

- Kong Serverless Gateways: Introduces the ability to integrate Kong's fully featured gateway quickly and cost-effectively. Traditionally, setting up a gateway on a server requires an investment in infrastructure and expertise, but with Serverless Gateways, developers can leverage a fully featured API gateway in a matter of minutes. With this new offering, developers can simply select the option of "Serverless" while creating a new gateway instance and begin defining services and setting up routes. Serverless Gateways eliminates the burden of gateway infrastructure, lifecycle management and maintenance by having Kong handle the management and upkeep.

- Advanced API and AI Analytics: New Advanced API and AI Analytics capabilities introduce precision troubleshooting with real-time and detailed insights into API performance. Capabilities include granular visibility into metrics such as latency and request size, as well as LLM-specific reporting, helping teams to improve and maintain API quality and performance.

- 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 third-party secret manager.