Kong / User Calls

Installing and configuring Kong Gateway is just the beginning. Once you’re in production there’s ongoing effort to keep your API Gateway online and make it’s configuration match what your business needs. Our recent Kong Gateway 3.4 and Kong Ingress Controller 2.11 releases are focused on operator efficiency, and contain a host of features that will make your life easier.

Join Veena and Michael as they walk you through some common failure modes of Kong Gateway and how our latest release helps you keep your API Gateway processing traffic 24/7.

Join Frederik Nakstad and Adelina Simion from Form3 to learn how they use the Kong Ingress Controller to manage service routes on Form3’s multi-cloud platform. You’ll get an overview of Form3’s platform and environment configuration and how they moved from a legacy ECS solution to running Kong in a Kubernetes-native way with the Kong Ingress Controller. This approach provides useful abstractions and makes it easier for the Form3 service teams to configure routes.

Join Manjiri Tapaswi (Senior Software Engineer, Konnect at Kong) for a ride around your Konnect organization’s administrative management!

Learn how to secure and govern your environment by setting up Teams and Roles, or enable SSO through an external authenticator. We’ll go over how to leverage System Accounts for hardening your automation and integrations.

Tune up your security risks monitoring, compliance maintenance, and responding to potential security incidents when they occur, by setting up and tracking Audit Logs.

Not an organization administrator? Worry not, we’ll go over navigating your user account’s management, customize your profile information, manage your password, delete your account and even exercise your right to be forgotten (RTBF) under GDPR. Finally, we’ll go over setting up your Personal Access Tokens (PATs) as an alternative to traditional passwords.

Are you running Kong Gateway below 3.0 and need help upgrading and what to look out for? Then this presentation is for you!

In this talk, Andrew Kew (Senior Technical Account Manager & Field Engineer at Kong) will discuss a few upgrade strategies from Kong Gateway 2.x to 3.x to ensure a zero downtime and smooth upgrade. Next to that, you will learn what to look out for when upgrading to 3.x. At the end of the presentation, Andrew will talk through some of the new features in Kong Gateway 3.0.

There are lots of iconic duos out there. Batman and Robin, Jelly and Ice Cream, and now, Kong and Kubernetes.

Join Michael as he shows what Kong Ingress Controller can do for you. We’ll take a look at how to secure your services with the KongPlugin CRD, how to use the Kubernetes events system to help debug when things go wrong, and we’ll even take a sneak peek at the upcoming Kubernetes Gateway API and how you can start using it today.

Kong plugins are the real muscle behind the Kong ecosystem, giving you the power to implement API gateway policies in a plug and play fashion.

In this session, we will deep dive into the Kong plugin architecture, basics around plugin development, testing, and automated delivery. You will have the opportunity to learn about different plugin phases during an API request, unit testing, and installation of a plugin in Kong Gateway.

We’ll show a live demo on how to develop a custom plugin in Lua and deploy it to Kong Gateway.

Join us for our March User Call where we will show you all new features and updates in Kong Gateway 3.2 and Kong Ingress Controller 2.9.

Tom Brightbill (Group Product Manager) will show you all new and exciting updates in Kong Gateway 3.2. In the new release, you will find new key functionality for everyone who operates Kong Enterprise in a hybrid environment, which further enhances its reliability. Some of the new updates which you will see are:

– Dataplane scale out
– Latency Based Steering
– FIPS 140-2 compliance to include all first party Kong plugins, in addition to Kong core

Michael Heap (Director of Developer Experience) will walk you through all new features in Kong Ingress Controller 2.9. Some of the highlights include Gateway API Conformance and gRPC Routes in Gateway API.

What is Kong Secrets Management?

Kong Secrets Management is a new feature that allows you to safely store and retrieve secrets used throughout the Kong Gateway deployment, improving the fundamental security of your applications. Securing your entire Kong deployment with centralized secrets makes it easier to manage and build governance around your Kong deployments.

Storing credentials in your API Gateway is a trap that many organizations fall into. Simon Green (Solutions Engineer at Kong) will show you how the Kong Secrets Management feature can help you integrate with a purpose-built external Identity Manager, eliminating secrets sprawl and improving your security posture.

mTLS server used during the session - https://github.com/joekir/mTLS-Tests

For our first User Call for 2023, Dominik Schmid and Benjamin Bertow from Mercedes-Benz Tech Innovation GmbH, are joining us to show us how they evolved API management to an open platform, integrating the Kong Gateway as the preferred gateway solution.

Have you ever thought about how big companies manage their APIs?

Mercedes-Benz teams currently manage around 1500 APIs.

We will talk about the past, present, and vision of the Mercedes-Benz API platform.

And most importantly, you will learn how only three Kong Gateway instances replaced hundreds of Apigee Edge Microgateways with zero downtime.

Kong Gateway 3.1 includes several new plugins, forming our most powerful plugin ecosystem yet and with an enhanced functionality for a few existing plugins.

For our last User Call for 2022, Gang Guo (Product Manager, Kong) will deep dive into the following new plugins:

- AppDynamics
- SAML2
- JWE Decryption
- OpenAPI Specification (OAS) validation
- XML Threat Protection

What's more, we introduced an enhancement into:

- Mock plugin
- Forward proxy plugin

Get a technical preview of the upcoming support for WebAssembly in the Kong Gateway leveraging WasmX, a project created by Kong that adds WebAssembly support into Nginx. You will learn:

• WebAssembly and what kinds of multi-language development it allows
• WasmX and how it extends Nginx capabilities to support WebAssembly in a way that is Virtual Machine agnostic
• Proxy-Wasm, the emerging standard for gateway extensions using Wasm, allowing filters to be written once and used in different gateways or meshes that support the format
• How WasmX integrates into the Kong Gateway, enabling the execution of Proxy-Wasm filters as easily as Kong Plugins

Kong Gateway 3.0 is now out and it's bringing a ton of useful functionality for you all to use. It's adding OpenTelemetry tracing, advanced secrets management and a brand new router in addition to the usual performance increases.

Michael Heap (Director of Developer Experience at Kong) takes you through the deprecations, breaking changes and brand new features that you need to be aware of in Kong Gateway 3.0.

We are turning our September User Call into a more casual and interactive session! Our Developer Relations team will be present to answer all questions you might have regarding Kong Gateway. This AMA session will feature Michael Heap, Kat Morgan, Vik Gamov and Rick Spurgeon from Kong's DevRel team.

Kong Konnect provides developers and API owners a powerful way to secure and manage their API products powered by Kong Gateway (the world's fastest API gateway).

Leverage Konnect to manage Kong Gateway data planes operating on-prem and in the public cloud – either as a centralized APIOps platform or federated experience across business units.

Ultimately, Konnect enables customers to reduce their operational costs by using our hosted runtime manager, service catalog, developer portal and analytics platform.

For our July User Call, join Sven Walther, Principal Solutions Engineer EMEA, to talk about “Using OpenAPI to automatically configure the Kong Gateway”.

We are going to automate the creation of Kong services, routes and plugin configurations only based on an OpenAPI file. The tools we will use next to Kong itself are Insomnia/inso-cli, decK and the Kong Ingress Controller.

Kong's Gateway offering comprises several frontend and backend services which can include an Admin API and GUI, Developer Portal API and GUI, as well as Ingress Controllers, data plane proxies, and various cache and database backend services. Join us in examining and deploying each as its own independent microservice helm release.

This month, join Enrique García Cota and Wangchong Zhou (both Senior Engineers at Kong) to discuss the improvements and feature sneak peek of Gateway 3.0.

Michał is discuss the latest update to the Kong Ingress Controller (Version 2.2), which includes our initial implementation of the Kubernetes Gateway API.

Kong’s User Calls are a place to learn about technologies within the Kong #opensource ecosystem. This interactive forum will give you the chance to ask our engineers questions and get ramped up on information relevant to your #Kong journey.

This month, Wangchong Zhao, Kong Senior Software Engineer will discuss how he and his team were able to obtain a 12% increase in RPS and a 37% drop in latency.

#KongGateway #Community #usercall #DevOps

In this session, DevRel Director Micheal Heap will show you Kong’s declarative configuration capabilities and how to use your CI system to lint and apply these configurations in a variety of environments. Test your changes in a staging environment, then apply exactly the same config to production with a click of a button.

Kong’s User Calls are a place to learn about technologies within the Kong open source ecosystem. This interactive forum will give you the chance to ask our engineers questions and get ramped up on information relevant to your Kong journey.

#KongGateway #decK #CICD #Kong

In this session, Senior Engineer Enrique Garcia Cota will walk you through what’s needed in order to build a custom plugin for the Kong Gateway (OSS) - just in time for the Kong Summit Hackathon 2021 starting on September 21st.

Kong’s User Calls are a place to learn about technologies within the Kong open source ecosystem. This interactive forum will give you the chance to ask our engineers questions and get ramped up on information relevant to your Kong journey.

Interested in participating in the next Hackathon? Sign up for updates here: https://konghq.com/summit-hackathon/

Since the general availability of the Kong Gateway (OSS) in version 2.5 we feature a new Performance Testing Framework. In this session, we’ll showcase an example test used for Gateway development, detail how a Kong Developer can get an environment set up to use the framework, and walk-through extending the framework to match your testing needs.

Kong’s User Calls are a place to learn about technologies within the Kong open source ecosystem. This interactive forum will give you the chance to ask our engineers questions and get ramped up on information relevant to your Kong journey.

In this session, we get you up-to-speed on the Kong Gateway 2.5 release with a summary of the features and news, including:
- New Testing Framework
- #Hybrid Mode Enhancements
- And more! 🎉

Kong’s User Calls are a place to learn about technologies within the Kong #opensource ecosystem. This interactive forum will give you the chance to ask our engineers questions and get ramped up on information relevant to your #Kong journey.

#KongGateway #KongGateway25

Kong #Kubernetes Ingress Controller (#OSS) has launched 2.0 with a number of awesome new features and fixes. In this session, join the Kubernetes Engineering team as we walk through the release highlights including:

Overview of 2.0
Major architectural improvements
Kubernetes Testing Framework (KTF) & new testing strategies
KIC 2.0 controller manager
And more

Kong’s User Calls are a place to learn about technologies within the #Kong #opensource ecosystem. This interactive forum will give you the chance to ask our engineers questions and get ramped up on information relevant to your Kong journey.

#KongGateway (OSS) has launched 2.4 with a number of awesome new features and fixes. In this session, join the Core Engineering team as we walk through the release highlights including:

- Developing plugins with Javascript
- Formatting logs and dynamically modify fields with Lua code
- Gateway Hybrid mode and compatibility checks
- And more

Kong’s User Calls are a place to learn about technologies within the #Kong #opensource ecosystem. This interactive forum will give you the chance to ask our engineers questions and get ramped up on information relevant to your Kong journey.

The Kong Gateway 2.2 release is right around the corner! Join our Core Engineering team as they walk you through the features and updates in this release including:
- Upgraded OpenResty and NGINX versions
- Deprecating Cassandra 2.2
- Extended functionality for Go plugins (response handling)
- UDP support (proxying, load balancing, and logging plugins)
- New route object attributes: dynamically configure request and response buffering
- Removed target history
- Set certificate per upstream client for proxying
- Automatically load OS certificates

Preview of the features in the upcoming Kong Gateway 2.2 release including UDP support, finer-grained buffering control, extended functionality for Go plugins, and more.

Want to learn more about the new features in Kong Gateway 2.1? Join our engineering team for a deep dive into the major features in this release. This interactive forum will give you the chance to ask our engineers questions and includes live demos to help you get ramped up on Kong Gateway 2.1.

This release comes packed with new functionality, ranging from updates for improved P99 latency to new features for gRPC, improvements to your favorite plugins and much more.

Notable features in this release include:

- Asynchronous load balancer updates to reduce latency spikes
- Expanded support for gRPC with two new plugins for gRPC traffic
- Plugin improvements all around including Zipkin, Rate Limiting, OAuth2, AWS Lamda, Prometheus, Serverless, LDAP, and Auth
- Postgres read-only replica support

We are happy to announce the much-anticipated Kuma 0.6 release! This new release ships with major improvements, especially when it comes to supporting service meshes that can span across multiple clouds, multiple Kubernetes clusters and hybrid platforms (Kubernetes + VMs) in enterprise environments.

Join Kevin Chen, Developer Advocate at Kong, for a demo of the new features in this release including:

- Hybrid Universal Mode - create different service meshes across both Kubernetes and VM workloads and support them within the same mesh.
- Automatic Service Discovery - Kuma simplifies cross zone communication by allowing users to create an Envoy-based ingress deployment on both Kubernetes and VMs.

Kuma has also been donated to the CNCF as a Sandbox project: the first Envoy-based service mesh to ever be donated to the foundation. We’ll discuss what this means for the future of the project and how you can get involved.

Join our next Online Meetup: https://konghq.com/online-meetups/

The world is changing and so is the way we work as we become increasingly distributed. We can’t apply old processes to new environments. Much like having to work from home has forced a change in how we work together as teams, successfully managing services in increasingly decentralized architectures demands a different way of thinking.

Join Melissa van der Hecht, Product Manager at Kong, to look at the surprising similarities between our own work processes and our services as we adapt to new routines in distributed locations. 

We’ll dive into how API Gateways fit into this new world, including ways to mitigate the impacts on:

- Visibility, security and governance
- Maintenance and care
- Efficiency and performance

Join our next Online Meetup: https://konghq.com/online-meetups/

kong-terraform-aws is a Terraform module for building Kong clusters in AWS. Leveraging Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) with Terraform and minimal requirements and configuration, you are minutes away from having a Kong cluster ready for traffic. It is the reference platform maintained by the Kong Cloud team for potential and existing customers to easily setup both Kong and Kong Enterprise for demo and PoC environments. The module is open source and can be extended to fit your production and enterprise needs.

In this session, Dennis, the author of the module and Senior Cloud Engineer at Kong, will walk you through the entire process including:

- AWS resources that are provisioned
- Cloud and security best practices
- Tuning your environment with variables

Time will be provided following for questions and answers.

Join our next Online Meetup: https://konghq.com/online-meetups/

We are thrilled to announce the general availability of Kong Gateway 2.0. With this release the technology will become more platform-agnostic to deploy it across on-premises and the cloud (Hybrid mode), and it also becomes more development language agnostic.

Join Guanlan, Engineering Manager at Kong, to take a deep dive into the key capabilities of the 2.0 release including:

Hybrid Mode - In hybrid mode, the cluster is managed through the admin API of the control plane. The control planes are then responsible for distributing changes of the configurations to the data plane nodes, that handle the actual user traffic. Cluster management is greatly simplified by running control-plane nodes using a database while data plane nodes don’t need to connect to a database and can be run DB-less.

Go Plugin Support - Plugins can now be written in Go as well as Lua. The Plugin Development Kit (PDK) gives developers access and control to the request and response flow of proxied requests. For Go developers we are providing a Go port of the PDK that provides the same functionality as when using Lua but with a native Go feel.

Let’s Encrypt Integration - Traffic can now be encrypted using certificates provided by Let’s Encrypt or any other ACMEv2 compatible Certificate Authority (CA), which eliminates the need to generate and renew your own certificates.

Major Prometheus Plugin Performance Improvement - Requests per second are now up to 100% faster.

We’ll also open it up for Q&A to answer any questions you might have on the 2.0 release.

Join our next Online Meetup: https://konghq.com/online-meetups/

In this call Optum talked about their journey to overhaul their API technology using Kong. They explained their implementation challenges and priorities considered when choosing Kong. The Optum team also shared how they've automated maintenance tasks and built their own stability test suites.

Join our next Online Meetup: https://konghq.com/online-meetups/

Kong Principal Engineer Thibault Charbonnier presented and demo’d upcoming features to be released in Kong 1.2 and 1.3. Thibault covered performance improvements, introduced newly open sourced plugins, and announced GRPC proxying.

Join our next Online Meetup: https://konghq.com/online-meetups/

In this call, we talk about Kong Community programs, where we’re at and where we’re headed, including an open forum for feedback and discussion from the community.

Join our next Online Meetup: https://konghq.com/online-meetups/

During this call, Jeremy Justus demonstrated the Kong Spec Expose Plugin built by Optum. We talked about the announcements at Kong Summit, and Thibault discussed his take on the changes in 1.0. We also had a detailed discussion of plugin debugging tools available in Kong, and herd from some of our most vocal community members.

Resources:

Spec Expose Plugin from Optum - https://docs.konghq.com/hub/optum/kong-spec-expose/
Kong integrations Hub - https://docs.konghq.com/hub/
Path prefix plugin - https://github.com/alexashley/kong-plugin-path-prefix

Join our next Online Meetup: https://konghq.com/online-meetups/

During this call, Colin Hutchinson demonstrated the work in progress on a repo to deploy Kong on Kubernetes, as a service mesh. We heard from Aapo Talvensaari about the settings available for routing raw TCP traffic in Kong 1.0, discussed sidecar injection into pods, and the separation between Kong data and control planes.

Resources:

Service mesh on Kubernetes: https://github.com/Kong/kong-mesh-dist-kubernetes/
Blog on the separation of control and data planes: https://konghq.com/blog/separating-data-control-planes/
Automatic sidecar injection in Kubernetes: https://github.com/Kong/kubernetes-sidecar-injector

Join our next Online Meetup: https://konghq.com/online-meetups/

In this call, we demo Kong’s newest open source project – Kuma, a modern, universal control plane for service mesh.

Service mesh is a new pattern to build reliable distributed and decoupled applications, but often too complicated to implement with 1st generation control planes. Kong takes a new approach to service mesh with Kuma in order to build modern architectures across a large variety of platforms, including Kubernetes and VMs. Kuma is a universal control plane that addresses limitations of 1st generation service mesh technologies by enabling seamless management of any service on the network.

We’ll walk you through easily setting up service mesh across multiple environments, and enabling security and observability – in any network – automatically. We will introduce new concepts and products along the way, and let developers and architects of any skillset being comfortable with service mesh.

Join our next Online Meetup: https://konghq.com/online-meetups/

In this call API Fortress talked about mocking APIs with Kong and API Fortress. You might want to mock APIs to build tests against them before the services are ready, to save money during service development, or to keep your development environments isolated. Learn how API Fortress uses Kong in their API mocking technology. Plus, see a demo.

Resources:

API Fortress logging plugin: https://docs.konghq.com/hub/apifortress/
Guest blog on Mocking APIs: https://konghq.com/blog/api-fortress-mock/
Docs for API mocking with API Fortress: https://apifortress.com/doc/mocking-services/

Join our next Online Meetup: https://konghq.com/online-meetups/

This month Tom Smith of Okta showed us how to secure APIs with Kong and Okta, and Cooper Marcus gave us a great primer on how to contribute to the documentation (in honor of Hacktoberfest).

Resources:

Okta plugin for Kong - https://docs.konghq.com/hub/okta/okta/
Docs contribution guidelines - https://github.com/Kong/docs.konghq.com/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md#contributing-to-docskonghqcom--
Good first issues for docs contribution - https://github.com/Kong/docs.konghq.com/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+label%3A%22good+first+issue%22

Join our next Online Meetup: https://konghq.com/online-meetups/

Cooper Marcus and James Callahan gave us a great demonstration about how Kong works when deployed as a service mesh. They discussed what service mesh means in Kong parlance, and fielded some wonderful community questions.

Resources:

Streams and service mesh documentation: https://docs.konghq.com/1.0.x/streams-and-service-mesh/
Service mesh definition: https://konghq.com/blog/defining-service-mesh/
A high-level overview of service mesh architecture: https://konghq.com/blog/steps-to-deploying-kong-as-a-service-mesh/

Join our next Online Meetup: https://konghq.com/online-meetups/

This month we had demos from two community members. Dennis Kelly showed off the Terraform module that he built to deploy Kong. Mars Hall demonstrated how to deploy Kong on Heroku.

Resources:

Terraform module overview talk - https://konghq.com/blog/kong-terraform-field-dreams/
Terraform module - https://github.com/zillowgroup/kong-terraform
Kong Heroku app - https://github.com/heroku/heroku-kong
Kong Heroku Terraform example - https://github.com/heroku-examples/terraform-heroku-common-kong-microservices

Join our next Online Meetup: https://konghq.com/online-meetups/

Kong engineer Harry Bagdi demos decK, a tool to manage Kong's configuration in a distributed manner. After, we'll facilitate an open forum for community members to discuss their projects, Q&A with Kong engineers, and more.

Join our next Online Meetup: https://konghq.com/online-meetups/

We announced the latest release of Kong for Kubernetes! Features include encrypted credentials, mutual authentication using TLS, native gRPC routing, performance improvements among other things.

With this release, Kong for K8s now has 100% coverage of Kong Gateway’s administrative API functions. This means that all the features of the Kong Gateway can now be used natively on Kong for K8s through Kubernetes resources.

Join Harry, engineering lead on the Kong for Kubernetes project, as he walks you through the newest features in this release including:

- Encrypted credentials
- Native gRPC routing
- Plugins for combination of Ingress and KongConsumer
- Admission Controller

We’ll also open it up for Q&A to answer any questions you might have on the 0.7 release.

Join our next Online Meetup: https://konghq.com/online-meetups/

Insomnia is an open source GraphQL and REST client aimed at making testing and debugging APIs easier. In October, we announced that we welcomed Insomnia to the team at Kong as the next step in our journey to build the service control platform for the future.

Join Greg, creator of Insomnia, as he walks you through the app and how to use to to explore and debug your REST and GraphQL services.

We’ll also open it up for Q&A to answer any questions you might have on Insomnia.

Join our next Online Meetup: https://konghq.com/online-meetups/

At Kong Summit, we announced the Alpha release of Kong Gateway 2.0. With this release, we are especially excited to address some of the most common requests from our community, as well as lay the foundation for continued growth and innovation within our open-source platform.

Join Kong Engineering Manager, Guanlan Dai, for a sneak peek of the new capabilities coming in 2.0:

- Go Plugin PDK - New PDKs allow users to develop Kong plug-ins in other popular languages, first up is Go.

- Hybrid Mode - Separates the data plane and control plane, allowing greater flexibility in infrastructure architecture and enabling the Hybrid mode.

- mTLS Support - Supports presenting a specific certificate while handshaking with upstream or other services for increased security.

Guanlan will demo the new Hybrid Mode, showing how you can deploy your data plane on-prem to get the maximum performance and also get the convenience to access your control plane on the cloud. We’ll also open it up to Q&A to answer any questions you might have on what’s coming in 2.0.

Learn more about Kong: https://konghq.com/