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About Konnect

Konnect streamlines the API lifecycle management process, empowering you to develop modern applications with enhanced speed, improved security, and greater efficiency. It uniquely combines a control plane, managed by Kong and hosted in the cloud, with the versatility of managing the data plane on your terms — either self-managed or through Kong, within your preferred network environment. At the heart of this platform is Kong Gateway, Kong’s innovative, high-performance, and adaptable API gateway, designed to meet your application development needs with agility and reliability.

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 group, which is composed of data plane nodes (and in the case of Kong Mesh proxies). The individual nodes can be running either on-premise, in cloud-hosted environments, or fully managed by Kong Konnect with Dedicated Cloud Gateways. Each data plane node retains the configuration in-memory, ensuring efficient and reliable service management across deployment models.

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 managed either by you or your cloud provider, or by Konnect.

Dedicated Cloud Gateways

Konnect features Dedicated Cloud Gateways, allowing for performant, scalable, and highly available global API management infrastructure. These gateways provide:

• Multi-region support with one-click provisioning
• No downtime for upgrades
• Scalability to handle varying API traffic workloads
• Private networking for secure connections

You can run Dedicated Cloud Gateways in autopilot mode to streamline the management of your API gateway resources by automatically adjusting to traffic and volume. This mode ensures that your infrastructure is prepared to handle traffic as it arrives, scaling resources to maintain consistent performance without manual intervention.

Dedicated Cloud Gateways also support private networking. Integration with AWS Transit Gateway, allows you to connect your networks in a way that supports your organization’s security requirements, enabling your Konnect-powered API infrastructure to interact with your internal networks and cloud resources securely.

Kong Gateway entities in Konnect

Each 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.