Kong, the microservices API company, today announced the availability of Kong Enterprise Edition, a modern microservices API abstraction platform built to handle the scale and traffic demands of large organizations. Used by application teams at Global 5000 companies, the new platform helps decouple legacy monolithic API services and enables enterprises to scale and secure APIs as they transition to a modern microservice-based architecture. By delivering the industry's only cloud-native, enterprise-grade platform that helps developer and IT teams manage, secure and scale microservices APIs, Kong Enterprise Edition is opening the market of microservices abstraction layers and increasing overall developer productivity. In a separate press release today, Kong also announced the company's official rebrand from Mashape to Kong Inc. and its vision for the future of microservices as they eclipse the outdated monolithic application development methods.

According to Marty Chavez, CFO of Goldman Sachs, in Business Insider, "We're redesigning the whole company around APIs. We're turning all of the verbs, all of the activities at Goldman Sachs into APIs. One of the things we're insisting on is a very high standard of lovely and impeccable documentation for these APIs, because we're opening up the vertical monolith which used to have only one API point, which was human beings on the phone."

Called "the poster child of digital transformation" by Forrester Research, APIs represent the key to integrating modern technology into applications. However, as applications grow in complexity and resource demand, effective management and orchestration is needed to ensure integration with IT infrastructure at companies of scale. Kong Enterprise Edition was designed specifically to provide professional teams with an efficient, microservices-friendly API gateway that works on private, public and hybrid cloud architecture and can easily grow alongside the business.

"Microservices are becoming the most important aspect of modern enterprise infrastructure and their connectivity and management will be a critical component for larger companies in the near future," said Augusto Marietti, CEO of Kong. "Adopting Kong Enterprise Edition future proofs architectural choices, whether the business is still running on legacy and looking to adopt containers or even serverless deployments."

Kong Enterprise Delivers Groundbreaking Features for Production Use at Scale

Deployed in a centralized pattern or as a sidecar, Kong Enterprise Edition offers a lightweight, extensible and flexible abstraction layer that securely manages communication between microservices APIs to run cloud-native, decentralized applications. It provides an enterprise-hardened collection of advanced features that dramatically expands the capabilities of Kong Community Edition, including:

• Powerful Admin GUI: The control panel graphical user interface provides the ability to edit, add and delete APIs, Consumers and Kong plugins by providing a rich set of customizations that simplify admin tasks.

• Developer portal: A rich set of developer management features that provides interactive API documentation, flexible customization options and native support for the most popular spec formats, including Swagger/OpenAPI Spec.

• Enterprise-level scalability: Fast moving companies that need to scale microservices alongside overall business growth will find the scaling features of the Kong Enterprise edition a great boost to developer, proxy and admin performance. These include faster rate limiting, network optimization via edge caching, the ability to combine Regex variables and dynamic transformations for routing purposes and Redis HA Sentinel support for high availability.

• Security and RBAC features: Administrators now have access to advanced security and governance features, including role-based access control, self-service resource provisioning, that provide more control over access to individual microservices and nodes. The platform also supports a range of third party authentication plugins, including OpenID Connect and LDAP to protect against internal threats and unauthorized access.

• Analytics capabilities: Modern applications cannot quickly react to changing user needs without accurate metrics and monitoring. The Kong Enterprise Edition includes real-time visualizations of traffic, performance and error requests made by individual APIs or end users and provides up-to-the-minute response logs and quota metering to ensure that users can review, report and respond to data trends filter-based alerts, inspection protocols and custom reporting capabilities that allow users to analyze and report data trends with second-to-second accuracy.

• Services and support: To ensure maximum uptime and long-term customer success, Kong Enterprise includes a 24/7, proactive customer success engineering team and support for mission-critical infrastructure deployments.