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About Konnect
Konnect is an API lifecycle management platform that lets you build modern applications better, faster, and more securely. The control plane is hosted in the cloud by Kong, while the data plane is managed by you within your preferred network environment. All of this is powered by Kong Gateway — Kong’s lightweight, fast, and flexible API gateway.
Konnect can help you with the following use cases:
- Developers: Use Konnect as the easiest way to manage Kong Gateway. This helps save time on writing boilerplate code used to protect and secure APIs.
- Small teams: Use features like API cataloguing, external developer portals, and API analytics to share and monetize their APIs.
- Large enterprise companies: Use multi-geo support for the control plane and achieve federated API management by giving central teams governance tools while providing API teams with speed and flexibility.
Konnect architecture
The Kong Konnect platform provides several hosted control plane options to manage all service configurations. You can use one or more of the following control plane options:
- Kong Gateway
- Kong Ingress Controller
- Kong Mesh
The control plane propagates those configurations to the data plane, which is composed of self-managed data plane nodes (and proxies in the case of Kong Mesh). The individual nodes can be running either on-premise or in cloud-hosted environments, and each data plane node stores the configuration in-memory.
In the getting started guide, we will show you how to use a Kong Gateway data plane node to create entities, such as services and routes.
Figure 1: Diagram of Konnect modules. The Konnect environment, hosted by Kong, consists of the Konnect applications, Konnect platform, and control planes. The Kong Gateway, Kong Mesh, and Kong Ingress Controller data plane nodes that are connected with the Konnect platform are self-managed.
Kong Gateway entities in Konnect
Entities, like services, are self-hosted in Kong Gateway.
Figure 2: Diagram that describes how entities, like services, routes, consumers, and load balancers, are self-hosted by the Kong Gateway data plane node.
Each self-hosted Kong Gateway data plane node contains the following entities:
- Services: A service is an entity representing an external upstream API or microservice. For example, a data transformation microservice, a billing API, and so on.
- Routes: Routes determine how (and if) requests are sent to their services after they reach the gateway. Where a service represents the backend API, a route defines what is exposed to clients. A single service can have many routes. Once a route is matched, the gateway proxies the request to its associated service.
- Consumers: Consumer objects represent users of a service, and are most often used for authentication. They provide a way to divide access to your services, and make it easy to revoke that access without disturbing a service’s function.
- Load balancers: Load balancing is a method of distributing API request traffic across multiple upstream services. Load balancing improves overall system responsiveness and reduces failures by preventing overloading of individual resources.
- Upstream targets: Upstream refers to an API, application, or micro-service that Kong Gateway forwards requests to. In Kong Gateway, an upstream object represents a virtual hostname and can be used to health check, circuit break, and load balance incoming requests over multiple services.
When you create one of these entities, like a service, using the Konnect UI or API, Kong automatically creates an entity in the corresponding data plane node.
For more information, see Kong Gateway Configuration in Konnect.