Application programming interface management company Kong Inc. today updated its platform with new artificial intelligence- and machine learning-powered tools designed to help automate the management of API lifecycles.

The new tools, Kong Brain and Kong Immunity, will be integrated into the Kong Enterprise API platform, which serves as a foundation for developers looking to build a cloud-native, microservices-based information technology 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 several companies that are attempting to cash in on the raging popularity of APIs, which allow applications to talk to each other.

Kong’s API management platform works by exposing services and legacy applications as APIs and also helps to scale up and secure those interfaces as developers rebuild apps on a microservices-based architecture.

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.

Kong Brain and Kong Immunity are new additions to Kong’s API management platform that will help to automate the service development lifecycle for modern apps. They do this by handling important processes such as documentation, configuration and traffic analysis, the company said.

Kong Brain works by collecting data from APIs in order to automatically create the documentation. Should any changes be made to the code, the documentation will be auto-updated to reflect these updates, Kong said. That saves time in development and production, allowing users to map services and APIs.

Kong Immunity, meanwhile, is designed to safeguard API security. The service uses machine learning algorithms to detect traffic anomalies and alert developers to any unusual behavior. It helps to diagnose what those problems are, and can also be used to address security threats before any damage is done, Kong said.

Analyst Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. said Kong’s new tools show how AI is changing enterprise software along two separate dimensions. These include: “AI uptake in the core product for uptake by users and developers, as we see with Kong Brain, and then on a more meta level to make software run more resilient, ideally creating a self driving platform such as with Kong Immunity,” Mueller said.

Kong Brain and Kong Immunity are available now under an early access program.

Image: Kong