Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

We're pulling back the curtain on a project we've been working on for some time now: the next evolution of the Kong brand. You may have noticed some changes recently to our site, swag, or socials. But today it's official: we're announcing Kong's rebrand and introducing our new mascot, Karl. Without further ado, let's dig in. Along the way, we'll give some insight into the "why" behind it all, while looking back at how things have changed since the early days of Kong. We were the API connectivity company.

A shared Kubernetes cluster rarely belongs to one team. Payments runs checkout in one namespace, search runs search-api in another, and a risk team runs a scorer somewhere else. One Speedscale forwarder captures API traffic for all of them. Redacting that traffic before it leaves the cluster is what makes it safe to use for testing (the background is in The PII Testing Dilemma). Until now, that forwarder ran exactly one DLP rule. Every team that needed a field redacted had to edit the same JSON document.

In Under the Hood with Go TLS and eBPF, I left socket tracking as an exercise for later. The example used bpf_get_current_pid_tgid() and explicitly excluded concurrent TLS operations. Capturing plaintext was enough for that post. With rustls, later arrived: I could read the HTTP payload perfectly and still attach it to the wrong TCP connection. That’s a frustratingly convincing failure. The request looks right. The response looks right. The application works.

OpenTelemetry graduated from the CNCF in May 2026 as, in the foundation’s own words, the de facto observability standard. The JavaScript API package alone did 1.36 billion downloads in twelve months. That kind of win has a side effect nobody plans for. Once a wire format is everywhere, has a receiver for every source, a transform language, and an agent your platform team already operates, people start putting things on it that have nothing to do with knowing whether a service is healthy.