Kong raises $43M Series C for its API Gateway | Hacker News Reader

Kong raises $43M Series C for its API Gateway

techcrunch.com

66 pointsUkiahSmith32 comments

Not to take anything away from Kong's accomplishment but this article was written 2 months ago. Here's the Press Release from Kong dated March 28th 2019:

https://konghq.com/press-release/kong-raises-43-million

Previous discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19512025

As someone who works as a software developer in Japan this is awesome. Kong is one of the few companies allowing remote work even outside of North America so I'm glad to see that they're growing.

When I first read the headline, I was surprised that the same maker of my dog's ultra-tough chew toys [1] was branching into tech B2B.

[1] https://www.kongcompany.com/

Thought this was about Kongregate, which is often shortened to Kong.

Happy for them. I know that Kong uses openResty with which I have worked and I hope some of that money goes into it.

On another topic, why would I use Kong instead of it's competitors built on envoy and with higher integration with kubernetes? Maturity?

> why would I use Kong instead of it's competitors built on envoy and with higher integration with kubernetes?

If you have kubernetes, you might prefer that. But Kong is also useful in scenarios that don't involve kubernetes at all.

Disclosure - I work at Kong.

Kong has a native kubernetes ingress controller. A large portion of our customers use us with K8s

I didn't know that, seems interesting. I will try it the first chance I get. Thank you

Can someone please explain me as a programmer, what value Kong could bring to my digital products?

This answer is a more "what value does an API Gateway provider bring" than Kong specific as it's been a couple of years since I did an in-depth comparison of the different options.

Say you have some developed kind of consumable service (think like fraud detection, geolocation, or machine learning recommendations, whatever) then using Kong or another API Gateway as a service type offering is a way to handle big chunks of all the boring but necessary infrastructure needed to bring that to market.

This is stuff like setting up plans, accepting payments, rate limiting, issuing and revoking api keys, docs, etc.

API Gateway's function like a proxy or CDN where api.example.com goes to blah.kong-api-service.com which then requests back to your-app-server.example.com so they're able to do these things without needing to get into your code.

Thank you.

I wish we had a little plain English summary like this for ... every company ;)

That's the job a marketing website should do.

Maybe.

The thing is "marketing" is usually what I'm trying to avoid when trying to understand what the company actually does.

I often look at the Wikipedia entry for companies or tech products after trying to unsuccessfully decipher the marketing babble on their website.

> like setting up plans, accepting payments

I might be stupid here, but I have not seen any mention of Kong handling those things on their website.

Not sure about Kong specifically, but monetization is a common feature API gateways support (Apigee)

Monetization is not built-in in most spi gateways / manager. You need to connect then to your payment provider.

Which is fairly easy with most products though.

An api gateway gives you all the hard to manage foundations of a publicly exposed production-grade api: rate limiting, multitenancy, pricing plans, monitoring, staging, and more, all at a predictable cost.

As someone who has spent the past two years delving into Kubernertes and other Docker orchestration platforms, the answer is currently... "not much".

Kong does have a certain position in the industry (they are at least "known"), but their competition has done a better job taking market share. There are many API Gateways and Service Meshes trying to get their piece of the pie, and Kong has so far failed to be one of the true front runners. Products built on top of Envoy have so far done a better job of attracting users.

That isn't to say Kong can't try to assert themselves with another injection of cash. The industry is still very much up in arms, with all of us waiting for someone to step up and take over as the defacto gateway and/or mesh; preferably BOTH the gateway AND the mesh. Kubernetes itself is effectively the defacto standard, but the things you plug into it are certainly still in flux.

I'm curious, which other commercial product offers service mesh on kubernetes / in from of microservices? Axway,IBM,red hat etc are all monolotiths and to big / slow for microservices.

Only other commercial firm I know of is crunch 42. And maybe you can count Salesforce api gateway.but they go a different way...

If you're on AWS, they will push you towards the AWS things such as "Amazon API gateway", which does ... API Gateway things.

Seems to be a similar case on Azure

https://aws.amazon.com/api-gateway/

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/microser...

Which is not a service mesh / micro service gateway...

I'm not following. First off, "service mesh" and "microservice" are not the same thing. There are plenty of microservice systems without a service mesh.

Second, look at https://aws.amazon.com/api-gateway/

It talks about routing to EC2 - that's virtual machines in Autoscaling groups and load balancers, running web apis, your classic backend microservices.

So this is a micro service gateway. Maybe it doesn't have the best pricing or features for your case, but it is a micro service gateway.

Then goes on to the other services that it routes to: lambdas and bunch of other things, including containers in ECS. Is that service mesh?

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/using-amazon-api-gatewa...

AWS now have a service mesh thing, which appears to be unconnected: https://aws.amazon.com/app-mesh/

Take a look here:

https://github.com/Haufe-Lexware/wicked.haufe.io

This goes into the right direction how I think a service mesh / microservice / micro gateway architecture should look / what the software needs to offer.

Well, do you need an API gateway in front of your http microservices? If you know what all of those things are, you might want Kong or one of its competitors.

Kong's engine is NGINX, so if you're happy configuring NGINX itself and that is good enough for you, you won't want Kong.

Ah, so Kong basically brings all my different API servers together and provides a single API endpoint to the outside world instead of using customers learn about different endpoints in different servers?

> brings all my different API servers together and provides a single API endpoint to the outside world

Correct. And gives you a single entry point where routing to the "different endpoints in different servers" can be controlled, and cross-cutting concerns can be applied - e.g. request logging, auth, rate limiting, https termination etc.

This is not unique to Kong, that is what a API Gateway product will do. But Kong is a fairly full-featured and configurable example of an API Gateway. e.g. you can write Kong plugins, in lua.

Could be any number of outside endpoints as well.

Imagine a dev shop with several teams, all building external facing apis. In this scenario you don’t want each team to reinvent the “external access, auth, audit & accounting” as well as rate limiting stuff.

It would take a lot of resources and probably end up insecure at places.

An API gateway gives you a convention and pluggable authentication system for the teams to consume and not worry about. At least in theory.

Something like that. :)

This page has a reasonable explanation of where an API gateway fits in:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/microser...

Easy...coworking spaces have dogs, and often, 3D printers... With the new Kong (c) API (TM), you can dream up and print new toys on the spot with Kong's patented Toy Platform, King (TM).

Keep your dog happy allows you to be a better bro-grammer!

/Obvious /s/

Seriously thought this was an article about Kong the dog toy company.

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