As more and more companies move to a multi-cloud strategy and increase usage of a cloud native infrastructure, API providers are under a lot of pressure to deliver APIs at scale in multi-cloud environments. At the same time, APIs should follow each company’s security requirements and best practices, no matter the cloud platform. These reasons explain why many providers have such complex API authorization requirements.

Just under one year ago, we launched version 1.0 of our Kong Ingress Controller (KIC). That was a huge milestone for us here at Kong, and we know it was for you – Kong Nation – as well. Since then, with the help of our community, we’ve merged over 300 new features and bug fixes and have started to enter a new era of KIC: version 2.0. Prior to releasing KIC 2.0, we want to make sure to incorporate community and customer feedback, so we are announcing the KIC 2.0 Beta.

In 2019, my team at Kong introduced a new open source project called Kuma. Now a sandbox project of the CNCF, Kuma is a modern, universal control plane for service mesh based on Envoy. As we celebrate Kuma’s achievements, I want to thank the Kuma community for your support and contributions!

Modern microservices-based architectures require companies to change not just the way they build applications but also how to deploy them. Basically, the new microservices foundation should be based on two main pillars: hybrid deployments and Kubernetes orchestrator. With the complete separation of the control plane (CP) and data plane (DP), Kong Gateway fully supports hybrid deployments.

More and more companies are eager to move their operations to the cloud. Yet, there’s quite a bit of ambiguity on what moving to the cloud actually means. Is your business running in the cloud while you host your database on another platform or while you rely on a third-party service to handle your payments? That’s a good start for moving to the cloud, but there are many other aspects to consider when building a cloud native infrastructure.

In my Service Mesh 101 article, I talked about some of the basics behind a service mesh: what it is, what it does and where Envoy fits into a service mesh. Having now covered those basics, I’d like to dig into some more in-depth content focused on the basics of Envoy configuration in a service mesh. Recall from the previous article that several different service meshes use Envoy. Istio is an example of a service mesh that leverages Envoy for its data planes.

If you’ve ever gotten sticker shock after receiving a surprisingly large cloud bill, this might have been your reaction… I think we’ve all been there. While the cloud makes flexible scaling possible, it has also introduced many new services one can use, resulting in increased cloud costs. In this article, I’ll go over the eight ways you can reduce your Kubernetes cloud costs. I use Amazon Web Services (AWS) as an example, but the lessons can also apply to other cloud providers.

What a year we have had! Hypergrowth, a huge community, and lots of recognition. But what we are most proud of is how Kong’s technology has impacted the world, thanks to our users. We can’t thank these users and the community enough for making Kong the most adopted open source API gateway out there. In fact, our technology just crossed 30,000+ stars on Github . And with over 2M instances and more than 257M downloads our OSS community has more than doubled over the last year.

If you’ve done any reading about service meshes, you’ve probably come across mentions of an open source project named Envoy. And if you’ve done any reading about Envoy, you’ve probably seen references to service meshes. How are these two technologies related? How are they different? Do they work together? I’ll attempt to answer all those questions in this blog post’s first and second parts, plus possibly a few more.

We are happy to announce a new major release of Kuma, and a new major release of Kong Mesh built on Kuma! Kuma 1.3 ships with 10+ new features and countless improvements. Kong Mesh ships we enterprise capabilities for large scale service mesh deployments. We strongly suggest to upgrade, in order to take advantage of the latest and greatest when it comes to service mesh.