We are pleased to announce the next release of our flagship enterprise offering, Kong Enterprise 1.5! This follow-up release adds additional stability and features on top of our last major release, Kong Enterprise 1.3, which we announced at Kong Summit 2019. 

Kong Enterprise 1.5 key features include Kong Immunity Consumer Alerts, OIDC improvements, and Kong Developer Portal Application Registration. There are also several smaller features and stability improvements packaged here. Lastly, this release includes substantial improvements to our documentation, including a new getting started guide and a refreshed look!

Consumer Alerts in Kong Immunity

Kong Immunity detects service behavior anomalies using machine learning. The new release extends this functionality with detection of anomalies  scoped to specific API consumers. This means all existing triggered alerts now come in two flavors – (1) endpoint alerts based on traffic belonging to a specific endpoint and (2) consumer alerts based on traffic in a workspace for a specific consumer. With consumer alerts functionality, alerts can now be specifically traced to individuals and teams that access APIs. We’ve also made a few improvements to services and routes pages in Kong Manager to account for these alerts.

OpenID Connect Improvements

The OpenID Connect plugin bundled with Kong Enterprise 1.5 features several improvements and fixes. The biggest addition is support for assertions on client authentication. The plugin is now able to authenticate itself with the OpenID Connect Providers using client_secret_jwt and private_key_jwt authentication methods. 

Application Registration (Beta) 

The ability for developers to create applications that package together a set of backend services is one of the most highly requested features we’ve received from our customers and users. In Kong Enterprise 1.5, we enable this through new features in Developer Portal and Kong Manager. The Developer Portal in Kong Enterprise 1.5 includes a new tab called “My Apps” that allows developers to create new applications (and credentials) and subscribe their applications to specific services/APIs. We also built a new “Portal Application Registration” plugin and added functionality in Kong Manager to provide API owners the ability to approve application access to underlying services. 

Currently, we’ve designated this feature as beta. This page explains the beta label, which is a delineation that we intend to use in a consistent manner moving forward. For beta features, we provide full support only in pre-production environments. In the next release of Kong Enterprise, we plan to make this feature supported in production. By that time, we also plan to have more enhancements and related functionality for this feature based on user feedback from this beta release.

Learn more about Application Registration here.

Other Improvements

Apart from the highlighted features mentioned above, this version of Kong Enterprise includes several smaller features, including full support for storing sensitive data fields in an encrypted format at rest within the database, sortable entity lists in Kong Manager, auto-detection of Apache Cassandra cluster topology without Kong restarts, a new hostname attribute for upstreams, IPv6 support for the IP Restriction plugin, and several other plugin improvements and bug fixes. 

For a complete list of changes, please see the Kong Enterprise 1.5 Changelog.

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We are very proud to announce some very important community updates for Kuma, with the goal of making Kuma more open and more inclusive to the broader open source ecosystem:

1. An open governance policy
2. Bi-weekly community calls

Open Governance

The Kuma project now ships with open governance guidelines! This makes Kuma the only Envoy-based control plane for service mesh with an open governance policy in the CNCF landscape.

The open governance policy was merged last week into “master” and provides guidelines to elect new maintainers of the project from the community. You can read the new governance policy here.

With this change, we commit to making Kuma a good OSS citizen in the community and providing a path to become maintainers to anybody who is a contributor to the Kuma project’s success and a citizen helping the project succeed.

Community Calls

In order to provide a regular forum for maintainers, contributors and end-users of Kuma to meet,  talk and be more productive and open together, we are starting regular remote meetings twice a month (every two weeks).

To participate in the Kuma community meetings: Add to Calendar

The goal of these meetings is to share thoughts and ideas, talk about the Kuma roadmap and create a more inclusive community that can work together to create the best and most open control plane for service mesh that the entire ecosystem – and industry – can use.

Last but Not Least

You can download Kuma and learn more about the project by going to the official website. Feel free to share your thoughts and feedback at the next community meeting or by joining the official Slack channel or opening an issue on Github.

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We built Kong to handle any API at any level of scale, but running APIs at scale means storing and managing data at scale. That’s why we’ve always recommended Apache Cassandra for the biggest Kong deployments.  

Cassandra is powerful and proven, but it does require some skill to install and operate – which is why we’re excited to hear that Datastax is making Cassandra easy to use at any level of scale with DataStax Astra, a Database-as-a-Service built on Apache Cassandra.

Now, Kong users at any level of scale can have the best of both worlds – easy setup and no operational worries, whether they’re generating 10 requests per second or 100,000.

Oftentimes, Kong users deploy something small and switch to a robust database solution as their program scales, like Cassandra. However, running Cassandra means users need to install, manage or scale their own Cassandra clusters. 

Available today, Datastax is offering a preview of how to deploy Kong with Astra. Through a simple configuration step, you can start relying on Astra as the Cassandra-based persistence, all with zero operational burdens for your team. Operations are clean and simple, and you don’t need to worry about the care and feeding of a Cassandra cluster. 

Datastax has a great free tier available for users to get started with, and we think this is going to be one of the easiest ways for people to get started with Kong and Cassandra at any level of scale.

To learn more, attend our full-day Destination: Decentralization digital event on April 16, where Matt Kennedy and Jim McCollom from DataStax will share their learnings in making Kong work on Astra.

You can learn more and try DataStax Astra here.

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