Video: 10 Minute IT Jams - Who is Kong?

Connectivity is king. As businesses large and small race to digitise, the challenge of connecting new and legacy IT systems intensifies. Few understand this more intimately than Brad Drysdale, Field Chief Technology Officer for APJ at Kong, who recently spoke with us about how his company is tackling the complexity of modern enterprise IT.

"Kong is a cloud connectivity company that is helping developers rapidly build software in today's increasingly hybrid and multi-cloud world," Drysdale explained. Today's digital landscape demands ever-better digital experiences for customers, and businesses are under constant pressure to deliver. Kong's answer is its service connectivity platform, Kong Connect, which Drysdale described as "enabling developers, architects and operators to seamlessly connect all of their services to deliver that unparalleled digital experience and to accelerate the application delivery and deployment cycles."

A central concern for many IT managers is how to keep tabs on all the moving parts. "For IT managers this actually represents a newfound ability to bring together all of the APIs and services that exist across the business and the broader IT landscape into that one single place to observe them, discover them, secure and protect them and also manage their ongoing adoption success," he said.

APIs, or Application Programming Interfaces, are pivotal in this strategy. They are "the key building blocks of success, be it through APIs to modernise legacy systems, unlock silos of data, or allow newly built applications - which often span multiple cloud environments - to be assembled and delivered much faster," Drysdale offered. Kong Connect, in his view, gives IT leaders a "single place to bring together all of the APIs across a modern, often complex and distributed IT state." The upshot? Better security, control, and governance, all delivered in "a modern and fully automated fashion."

Drysdale pointed to the growing complexity of IT as both a challenge and an opportunity. "It allows them [IT managers] to obtain the best possible talent in a heavily competitive and talent-constrained market and allows them to innovate rapidly in response to those market and competitive conditions," he said. But there's a sting in the tail: "The challenge is, how do we embrace all of that in a secure, manageable fashion so that complexity becomes the innovation enabler and not a crippler to productivity?"

Kong's suite of products aims to address precisely this. The platform comprises a suite of tools, from Insomnia for designing and debugging APIs, to Kong Gateway and Kong Mesh for managing, securing, and controlling them, as well as a service hub and developer portal to foster "seamless discovery and adoption." The vision is of Kong as a "central nervous system - it's kind of that spine for connectivity which helps makes the business run," Drysdale said.

New features and product updates are central to Kong's strategy to keep pace with customers' needs. At the company's recent Kong Summit, Drysdale said, "we announced new plug-and-play products and capabilities for managing and securing APIs." Among these, Kong Academy stands out as an initiative to provide customers with not just technology but also "training, certification and a sense of community with virtual and in-person training options." As he put it, "this is just really about ensuring our customers have everything they need to keep up and that's hugely important to us."

The Summit also saw the launch of Kong Istio Gateway, a significant move that, according to Drysdale, means "Kong Gateway now supports Istio Gateway integration… This allows you to expose Istio services within the Kong Gateway to provide full API life cycle management." For businesses already invested in Istio or considering it, this development "will help make their teams more comfortable to adopt it by allowing Kong to cover all the gaps in terms of security and control," he added.

Other advancements announced include Insomnia Projects, a collaborative tool allowing developers "to share their Insomnia API collections and allows teams to share notes and best practices." On performance, Kong Gateway 2.6 was launched with "latency cut by over 30 percent and throughput increased by 12 percent," achievements Drysdale considers "actually quite impressive." Additional enhancements included a plugin for JSON message processing and better support for Kafka with improved security frameworks - features in response to what he called "common requests from our customers."

"Kong Mesh version 1.5" was also unveiled, bringing support for Windows and upgrades for hybrid discovery and multi-cloud access control. And in a nod to the growing demands for stronger authentication, Kong announced single sign-on support with Okta within Kong Connect, offering, as Drysdale described, "role-based mapping and one-click integration."

All these efforts are wrapped together with a new technical preview called Wazomex, which brings the power of WebAssembly to Kong users. "It's available today as a technical preview and can be used to create custom plugins for Kong and to extend the gateway's capabilities in a powerfully language-agnostic fashion," said Drysdale. The idea is to empower developers to use the programming languages of their choice, a move he sees as "a powerful and inclusive way to ensure that the fastest possible innovation on Kong occurs."

Throughout the conversation, Drysdale emphasised that Kong's approach is always about listening and responding to customer needs. "We don't sit still, we're actively listening to our customers and making sure that we're not only delivering the capabilities they need to be successful today, but we're also thinking about what's next and how we can help bring the best of Kong to our customers' future ambitions and road maps as well."

For those interested in engaging with Kong, Drysdale's advice is simply to "come and talk to us." He continued, "If you're challenged by complexity or finding it hard to stitch together that modern enterprise to allow data to flow more freely into the digital enterprise that you're trying to improve then you know Kong might well be the answer." The message, ultimately, is one of partnership: "We're always more than happy to help."