Application programming interface connectivity firm Kong Inc. is upgrading its technology stack, adding new “plug-and-play capabilities” today that it says will make APIs and microservices as easy to consume and manage as electricity.

Kong has built software and managed services that connect APIs and microservices natively across and within clouds, Kubernetes, data centers and more using intelligent automation. Kong Konnect is a full-stack service connectivity platform that allows developers, architects and operators to deliver connectivity at the edge, within their applications and in between applications from one control plane.

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. They’re 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.

In an interview with SiliconANGLE last month, Kong co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Augusto “Aghi” Marietti said Kong’s technology can be thought of as a central nervous system for the cloud.

“We’re building a kind of connectivity tissue for the cloud, an API platform that allows you to manage, secure and govern all of your APIs from one single place,” he said.

Kong believes this comprehensive API management is necessary because the majority of developers spend more time on maintenance and operations work than they do on actual coding. So they’re nowhere near as productive as they could be. To rectify the situation, Kong has developed a new concept of “APIOps” that brings the principles of DevOps and GitOps to the API and microservices lifecycle. With APIOps, Kong is looking to fully automate API management to ensure the consistent, continuous delivery of connectivity for any application.

The latest release of Kong Konnect, announced at Kong Summit 2021 today, brings the Istio Gateway solution into general availability, making it possible for customers to use Kong’s security, identity and observability policies with the open-source Istio service mesh. That’s a dedicated infrastructure layer that’s used to control service-to-service communications over a network. In addition, the Istio Gateway brings full lifecycle API management capabilities to Istio clusters, including developer portals, API catalogs and API analytics.

“With the new Istio Gateway, Kong customers can govern traffic entering their Istio deployments so they no longer have to do the dreaded task of writing and maintaining policies for user governance and tiering, building catalogs and developer portals, and overall API management,” said Kong co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Marco Palladino.

The Kong Konnect platform also delivers the latest release of Kong Mesh, which is the company’s own service mesh offering. Kong Mesh 1.5 adds support for Windows, something Kong describes as an industry-first. The goal is to enable a massive increase in the surface area that meshes can cover as well as remove current bottlenecks.

Another key component of Kong Konnect is the Kong Gateway, which gains new features including enhanced support for Apache Kafka. That will allow users to deploy, manage and consume synchronous, or event-based, APIs and microservices more easily. Developers will be able to streamline the deployment of real-time apps, Kong said.

Finally, there’s a new version of the Kong Ingress Controller for developers to play with. Version 2.0 adds support for the user-data protocol and the ability to watch multiple Kubernetes namespaces to glean more insights on how individual product workloads are performing.

Palladino said today’s release means the company is finally delivering on its vision of making cloud connectivity as simple as plugging a device into an outlet and switching it on. “It has been my dream to provide developers and operators with the ‘plug and power outlet’ experience so when they build new APIs and microservices, they don’t have to worry about how they will be deployed and have the confidence to know they will just work,” he said.

Palladino stopped by theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio, in March to discuss how automating API connectivity can accelerate software delivery:

Image: Kong