Kong Konnect

The full-stack connectivity platform for cloud-native applications

End-to-end Service Connectivity Platform

We live in a connected world. Every application we use, whether within or outside of work, is built on top of dozens, sometimes hundreds of services that enable our digital, connected experiences. For example, think of an application that allows you to control your garden sprinklers. While it may seem simple on the surface, underlying that application are likely a dozen or so services as illustrated below.

Kong Konnect Overview

In the diagram above, each of the red circles represents a connectivity end-point. At each of these points, connectivity logic is required. Connectivity logic addresses concerns such as ensuring that incoming requests are authenticated, authorized, rate-limited, and logged, or that, as a new version of a service is introduced, requests from incompatible older versions of the service’s consumers are routed to the older version.

Most organizations build and manage their connectivity logic from scratch many times over across each team, application, and service. This Do-It-Yourself approach is unfortunately not only inefficient, but it also leads to significantly lowered reliability, speed, and insight across the connected experiences that form the touchpoints (web apps, mobile apps, APIs) of the modern organization’s interactions with its customers, partners, and employees.

As a Service Connectivity Platform (SCP), Konnect enables reliability, speed, and insight by providing common, out-of-the-box connectivity logic, executed through connectivity runtimes and managed through functionality modules across points of connectivity within your applications.

Reliability

If connectivity logic fails — for example, a piece of logic that authenticates incoming requests — there could be serious security and availability consequences. Konnect provides rock-solid, pre-validated, and tested connectivity logic that can be applied to connectivity endpoints and executed through highly reliable connectivity runtimes, minimizing the risks of service failures and security vulnerabilities.

The components of Konnect that enable this reliability are defined in the following table:

Konnect Component {:width=20%:}	Description
Kong Gateway	High-performance connectivity runtime for executing edge connectivity logic.
Kong Ingress Controller	High-performance connectivity runtime for executing inter-app connectivity logic within a Kubernetes environment.
Kong Mesh	High-performance connectivity runtime for executing in-app connectivity logic. Kong Mesh is built on the Kuma service mesh open-source project.
Kong Plugins	Secure, tested, and reliable connectivity logic for all connectivity needs applied through the Kong Gateway and Kong Ingress Controller runtimes. Many plugins are built and supported by Kong Inc., and a wide array of plugins are also built and maintained by the Kong community.
Runtime Manager (Cloud only)	Functionality module that enables provisioning instances of Konnect’s supported runtimes. Runtime Manager provides a unified view of all of these runtimes and their current status. Note: Currently, the only supported runtime type in the Runtime Manager is a Kong Gateway data plane.

Speed

Konnect provides increased velocity of service development and faster connectivity runtime performance.

Service Development Velocity

The connectivity logic that comes out of the box with Konnect allows developers to focus on business logic and not need to rewrite a piece of connectivity logic every time. In turn, this leads to faster development. Konnect enables developers to rapidly search for and discover existing services, which they can reuse to accelerate the development of their applications.

The components of Konnect that enable service development velocity are defined in the following table:

Konnect Component {:width=20%:}	Description
Insomnia	API debugging, design, and testing tool for developers. Allows developers to rapidly explore and consume existing services of different protocols (spawning REST, GraphQL, and gRPC), design services using a spec-based approach, and write and build a suite of tests while collaborating with other developers. Using Insomnia, you can generate Kong Gateway and Kong Ingress Controller runtime configurations directly from their API specs. Developers can rapidly map their API designs to connectivity logic that exposes those designs within a connectivity runtime.
Dev Portal Cloud docs Self-managed docs	Functionality module that enables the formal publishing of API docs to an API catalogue through which developers (typically external to an application team) can discover and formally register to use the API.
ServiceHub (Cloud only)	Functionality module that enables the cataloging of all services into a single system of record. This catalog represents the single source of truth for your organization’s service inventory and their dependencies. By leveraging ServiceHub, application developers can search, discover, and consume existing services to accelerate their time-to-market, while enabling a more consistent end-user experience across the organization’s applications.

Connectivity Runtime Performance

Any unnecessary latency incurred in the execution of connectivity logic is compounded across each of the dozens to hundreds of connectivity endpoints underlying modern applications. All of Konnect’s out-of-the-box high performance connectivity logic and connectivity runtimes are optimized to minimize this latency.

Insight

Connectivity endpoints provide sources of insight across three different dimensions:

At the service level: for example, how many versions of Service A are there and what does each version’s interface look like?
At the application level: for example, what is the overall uptime of the Device App?
At the business level: for example, which device types use our applications the most?

Konnect captures this insight and provides tools that make it easily accessible to any stakeholders. The components of Konnect that enable service development velocity are defined in the following table:

Konnect Component {:width=20%:}	Description
Vitals Cloud docs Self-managed docs	Functionality module that enables the capture and generation of service usage and health monitoring data. This module’s capabilities can be enhanced with Konnect plugins that enable monitoring metrics to be streamed to third-party analytics providers such as Datadog and Prometheus.
ServiceHub (Cloud only)	Functionality module that enables the cataloging all of all services into a single system of record that represents the single source of truth of your organization’s service inventory and their dependencies. By leveraging ServiceHub, enterprise architects can attain a better understanding of the organization’s inventory of services, in terms of the level of reuse, usage, and operational health of services across different teams and environments.

Konnect Component {:width=20%:}

Description

Vitals

Cloud docs
Self-managed docs

Functionality module that enables the capture and generation of service usage and health monitoring data. This module’s capabilities can be enhanced with Konnect plugins that enable monitoring metrics to be streamed to third-party analytics providers such as Datadog and Prometheus.

ServiceHub
(Cloud only)

Functionality module that enables the cataloging all of all services into a single system of record that represents the single source of truth of your organization’s service inventory and their dependencies. By leveraging ServiceHub, enterprise architects can attain a better understanding of the organization’s inventory of services, in terms of the level of reuse, usage, and operational health of services across different teams and environments.

Cloud-native Service Lifecycle

As the number of connectivity endpoints and runtimes increases, the automation of their lifecycles becomes more critical, as automation allows for a high velocity of change in a reliable manner. Konnect is designed from the ground up to enable this level of automation across both legacy environments and more modern, containerized infrastructure. It provides all capabilities through CLIs, declarative configuration interfaces, and well-defined APIs.

The components of Konnect that enable this cloud-native lifecycle are as follows:

Konnect Component {:width=20%:}	Description
decK	decK is a tool that allows for the management of Kong Gateway’s configuration in a declarative fashion. It can sync configuration to a running cluster, diff configuration to detect any drift or manual changes, and back up Kong Gateway’s configuration. It also can manage the configuration in a distributed way using tags, helping you split configuration across various teams.
Kong Ingress Controller CRDs	The Kong Ingress Controller runtime’s lifecycle can be managed entirely through Kubernetes CRD manifests, which can be applied through the Kubernetes `kubectl` command line.
Kong Gateway’s Admin API	The Kong Gateway runtime provides an internal REST-based Admin API. Requests to the Admin API can be sent from any node in the cluster, and Konnect will keep the configuration consistent across all nodes.
Inso command line	Inso is a CLI for Insomnia that exposes Insomnia’s application functionality to be invoked via a terminal or within a CI/CD pipeline for automation of API debugging, testing, and configuration generation.
Konnect Cloud Admin API	Konnect provides a REST-based Cloud API that exposes all of the functionality of its Cloud web interfaces.