Application programming interface management company Kong Inc. today updated its core platform and introduced a new product based on technology obtained from a startup called Floating Keyboard Software Inc.

Kong’s main product is its Service Control Platform, which enables end-to-end service lifecycle management, from preproduction to postproduction, to support customers building and managing innovative applications and services.

It’s essentially a management platform that works by exposing services and legacy applications as APIs. It also helps to scale up and secure those APIs as developers rebuild apps on a microservices-based architecture. The platform incorporates artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies to automate many of its processes.

APIs are the preferred method of exposing data and services when building microservices-based apps 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 using an app and have that reservation appear automatically in Google Calendar.

Kong’s biggest news today is that its acquired Floating Keyboard Software, which does business as Insomnia and offers a popular open source API testing platform of the same name. Kong said the main reason for the acquisition was to expand its design and testing capabilities.

It’s doing so with a new product called Kong Studio, which is a set of tools based on Insomnia’s technology that can be used to build and maintain APIs for the REST and GraphQL communications protocols used in web services development. With Kong Studio, application developers can now “edit spec files, generate mock endpoints with Mockbin, and publish directly into the Kong Gateway, Registry and Developer Portal,” the company said.

Kong has also promised to continue supporting the open-source version of Insomnia.

Kong’s main Service Control Platform has been updated as well. Available with the Kong Enterprise 2020 release, it now comes with protocol support for REST, Kafka Streams, gRPC and GraphQL. Also included are new machine learning capabilities for detecting anomalies and a new visual service map via Kong Brain.

“Executives want more automation and platform abstraction and Kong does both with Kong Enterprise 2020 and its acquisition of Insomnia,” said Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president of Constellation Research Inc. “Quality management and testing are key capabilities for enterprises that need to build their applications faster and more reliably to achieve enterprise acceleration.”

The company has also open-sourced a new tool called Kuma, which is a universal control pane for service meshes based on Envoy. A service mesh is a dedicated infrastructure layer that controls service-to-service communications over a network. It provides a method in which separate parts of an application can communicate with each other.

The problem is that most service meshes lack a mature control plane, which means developers face substantial manual work when it comes to setting them up. Kuma addresses the limitations of first-generation service mesh technologies by enabling seamless management of any service on the network. It can run on any platform, including Kubernetes, containers, virtual machines or bare metal, and includes a fast data plane and an advanced control plane that makes it significantly easier to use.

Today’s updates go a long way toward ensuring that Kong can make data available to application developers anytime and anywhere. They also help it serve as a kind of “nervous system” for hybrid and multicloud information technology environments, according to co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Augusto Marietti.

“Last year, we debuted our vision for an intelligent service control platform for connecting, managing and optimizing services in production, and we’re excited to expand that vision to include how services are designed, tested and distributed among increasingly decentralized workloads,” Marietti said. “With today’s news, we are providing developers the freedom to test and build in the best way possible, while also providing management teams with the tools to ensure efficiency and governance.”

Image: Kong