Frequently Asked Questions - Control Plane Upgrades

Are Konnect control plane and associated database migrations or upgrades done by Kong Inc?

The Kong Gateway control plane and its dependencies are fully managed by Konnect. As new versions of Kong Gateway are released, Konnect supports them as long as they are under our active support schedule.

Will Konnect control plane upgrades always show incompatible messages on the Gateway Manager page if the data plane nodes are not the same version as the Konnect control plane?

An old configuration may still be 100% compatible with older data plane nodes and therefore not show any error messages in the Konnect UI. If there are compatibility issues detected when pushing the payload down to the data plane then this will be reflected in the UI.

Will new features be available if Konnect control plane detects incompatible data plane nodes?

New features will not be available for use or consumption on incompatible data plane nodes. You will see new features available in the Konnect UI regardless of the data plane that is connected to the control plane in Konnect. However, when an update payload is pushed to an incompatible data plane, the update will be automatically rejected by the data plane.

This is managed by a version compatibility layer that checks the payload before the update gets sent to the data plane. If there are concerns with the payload, metadata is added to the node. That metadata is what will display incompatibility warnings or errors in the Konnect UI.

For example, let’s say a parameter is introduced with a new version of a plugin, and is available in the Konnect UI. The data plane, however, is running an older version of Kong Gateway and doesn’t support the new parameter. If that parameter is not configured, or is assigned the default value, then no warning or incompatibility metadata will be applied to the node in Konnect, and no warnings or errors will appear.

Can customers continue to use older versions of configurations as the Konnect control plane auto-upgrades?

Yes all decK dumps, or YAML configurations, will continue to work in Konnect after they are synced.

Are there any disruptions if customers choose not to upgrade their data plane nodes?

There is NO disruption at all if customers choose NOT to upgrade their data plane nodes, as long as the version of the data plane is under our Kong Gateway active support timeline.