Kong Inc. today added a gateway to its API management platform that is specifically designed to integrate event-driven applications using application programming interfaces (APIs).
Company CTO Marco Palladino said Kong Event Gateway enables software engineering teams to now apply the same fundamental approach used to integrate other classes of applications across event-driven applications. Kong Event Gateway is based on Kong Konnect, the same foundation that Kong uses to enable DevOps teams to invoke REST APIs alongside APIs for accessing large language models (LLMs).
In general, event-driven applications are both more complex to build and integrate than almost any other type of application. However, as more modern applications that process and analyze data in near real-time, based on, for example, messaging platforms such as Kafka, are built, the number of event-driven applications being built and deployed in recent years has steadily increased.
Kong Event Gateway makes it possible to invoke Kafka via HTTP APIs or as native Kafka services that communicate over the Kafka protocol. That latter native Kafka proxy option is currently in early access.
The overall goal is to simultaneously make it easier to reuse Kafka clusters in a way that can also be centrally governed more easily, said Palladino.
Additionally, traffic moving between EDA workflows and endpoints can be encrypted to ensure application security, he added.
In general, application management has become more challenging as the number and types of applications being deployed have become more diverse. DevOps teams today are typically managing a range of monolithic and microservices-based applications. Most of those applications are batch-oriented, but as digital business transformation initiatives have increased, there is now a higher percentage of applications that need to process data in near real-time using an event-driven architecture.
The Kong Konnect platform provides DevOps teams with a series of options for managing APIs using a combination of a service mesh, proxy software, ingress controllers and API gateways. Depending on the level of complexity and the number of APIs that need to be managed, Kong Konnect is designed to enable DevOps teams to choose whatever method they prefer to integrate applications. Regardless of approach, application connectivity is maintained by DevOps teams at Layer 7 rather than by a networking team relying on a lower Layer 4 of the networking stack.
Regardless of how application connectivity is achieved and maintained, it’s apparent that application environments are becoming more complex. The challenge is finding a way to streamline the management of application connectivity when new dependencies between APIs are being created almost daily. In fact, one of the reasons many organizations are embracing platform engineering as a methodology for managing DevOps at scale is to streamline the management of application connectivity.
Hopefully, as part of that transition, DevOps and network operations teams will become more integrated than they typically are today. In the meantime, however, it’s clear DevOps teams now at the application level have access to a higher level of abstraction that provides them with more programmatic control than ever over how applications are integrated.
