Enterprise application programming interface management company Kong Inc. today announced the 1.0 release of its open-source technology platform.

The company says Kong 1.0 is now “feature-complete” and ready to serve as a foundation for developers looking to build a cloud-native microservices information technology architecture that can leverage advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning.

The company said its platform works by exposing services and legacy applications as APIs and also helps to scale and secure those interfaces as developers rebuild those apps on a microservices-based architecture.

Kong, which has raised $26 million from prominent investors that include Andreessen Horowitz LLC, Charles River Ventures LLC and Amazon.com Inc. Chief Executive Jeff Bezos, is one of a number of companies that are attempting to cash in on the raging popularity of APIs.

APIs are the preferred method of exposing data and services when building applications made up of loosely coupled microservices, or application components, in software containers that can be extended across different computing environments. APIs are used to connect different services, making it possible, for example, to book a flight and have that reservation appear automatically in Google Calendar.

But microservices are also complex beasts, especially when they’re used at scale. That’s why enterprises require API management and orchestration services such as Kong.

Kong, which has actually been in production for four years, provides a scalable API gateway that’s compatible with private, public and hybrid cloud infrastructures. Kong is essentially a lightweight and extensible abstraction layer that can securely manage communications between microservices and APIs, allowing developers to visualize traffic in real time and monitor application performance.

Management is done from a graphical user interface-driven dashboard with an extensive set of customizations for administrative tasks. There’s also a developer portal that provides functionality for application documentation and customization, plus native support for the most popular spec formats, including the Swagger framework.

New features in Kong 1.0 include support for service mesh patterns, the Kubernetes Ingress controller and backward compatibility between versions. The company said the release represents the maturity of its core open-source project.

“It includes the foundation towards our larger vision of moving beyond simple API management and building a service control platform that leverages artificial intelligence, machine learning and other technologies to intelligently broker the flow of all information among services,” Marco Palladino, Kong’s cofounder and chief technology officer, said in an interview.

Kong’s API platform is rivaled by other companies including Google through its $625 million acquisition of Apigee Inc., and startups Jitterbit Inc. and SnapLogic Inc. also provide similar services. Kong said it’s superior to Google LLC’s Apigee, which it claims is a “legacy platform” built before the arrival of new technologies such as software containers.

“We displaced many of these legacy platform because they have difficulty supporting modern architectures such as service mesh, cloud and serverless,” Palladino said. “Kong was built with scalability, flexibility and extensibility in mind so that we continue to adapt to the demands of new architectures while still supporting services that use traditional and legacy systems.”

Kong claimed thousands of companies ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies are already using Kong, including Ferrari N. V., Yahoo Japan Corp., Giphy Inc. and Healthcare.gov.

Image: Kong