This document provides an overview of Kong, an open-source API gateway. It discusses that Kong is a cloud-native, scalable middleware between clients and APIs, and supports features like authentication, security, traffic control, and analytics. The document also summarizes the Community and Enterprise editions of Kong, including that the Enterprise edition provides additional capabilities like an admin GUI, API analytics, and support. It concludes with an example of using Kong to expose an API and discusses benefits and concerns of Kong.

1. KONG
An API Gateway
Yohann Ciurlik
Date : October 17th 2017
Version : 1.1

2. Introduction

3. 3
Introduction
Quick overview
• Open-source cloud-native, fast, scalable, and distributed Microservice
Abstraction Layer
• Backed by the battle-tested NGINX with a focus on high performance, Kong was
made available as an open-source platform in 2015 by Mashape.
• Under active development, Kong is used in production at thousands of
organizations from startups, Global 5000 and Government organizations.
• Licensing model :
– Enterprise Edition (EE)
– Community Edition (CE)

4. 4
Introduction
What is Kong ?
• Kong is an API gateway : it’s a form of middleware between computing clients
and your API-based applications.
• Kong easily and consistently extends the features of your APIs. Some of the
popular features deployed through Kong include :
– authentication,
– security,
– traffic control,
– serverless,
– analytics & monitoring,
– request/response transformations
– and logging.

5. 5
Introduction
Why use Kong ?
• Kong is :
– Radically Extensible
– Blazingly Fast
– Open Source
– Platform Agnostic
– Cloud Native
– RESTful

6. Community Edition (CE)

7. 7
Community Edition (CE)
Focus on Community Edition (CE)
• Available on Github
– Actual version : 0.11.0
– Apache v2 licensing
– 3500 commits, 12,5 k*, 1400 forks
• No UI & Analytics on CE (!!!)
– OS community UI :
• Konga
• Kongdash,
• Kong Dashboard (desktop)
– Analytics :
• ELK
• Runscope, Datadog, …

8. 8
Community Edition (CE)
A lot of open source plugins
• Authentication
– Basic
– Key
– HMAC
– OAUth 2
– LDAP
– JWT
• Security
– ACL
– CORS
– Dynamics SSL
– IP Restriction
– Bot Detection
• Traffic control
– Rate Limiting
– Response Rate Limiting
– Request Size Limiting
– Request termination
• Analytics & Monitoring
– Galileo
– Datadog
– Runscope
• Transformations
– Request Transformer
– Response Transformer
– Correlation ID
• Serverless
– AWS Lambda
– OpenWhisk
• Logging
– TCP
– UDP
– HTTP
– File
– Syslog
– StatsD
– Loggly

9. Enterprise Edition (EE)

10. 10
Enterprise Edition (EE)
Benefits
• Admin GUI
• Dev Portal
• API Analytics
• More scalability
• More security
• 24/7 support
• More information on https://konghq.com/kong-enterprise-edition/

11. 11
Enterprise Edition (EE)
Dev portal & admin GUI in EE
https://gelato.io/
Markdown explorer
Automatic API Explorer
Import OpenAPI/Swaggr
Developer Registration

12. 12
Enterprise Edition (EE)
Kong Analytics platform in EE
https://getgalileo.io/
Realtime Logging
Diff comparaison

13. Architecture overview

14. 14
Architecture overview
Based on OpenResty (Nginx & LUA scripting)

15. 15
Architecture overview
Native scalability

16. 16
Architecture overview
How to install and start Kong …
• Distributions
– Docker, Vargrant, Pre-built packages
– Homebrew, AWS, Azure, Heroku, CloudFormation
• Start in 1 min :

17. 17
Architecture overview
How to administrate and configure Kong ?
• Postman is your best friend for all configuration tasks
– Information routes
– API
– Consumer
– Plugin
– Certificate
– SNI
– Upstream
– Targets
• Also a CLI Tool that allows you to start, stop, and manage your Kong instances.

18. 18
Architecture overview
Extend it with your own plugin
• Using LUA Scripting
– simple-plugin
– ├── handler.lua
– └── schema.lua
• Build the plugin and install it on the server
• More information on https://getkong.org/docs/0.11.x/plugin-development/
• Then configure it on your API :

19. Going further with Kong

20. 20
Going further with Kong
Proof of Concept
• Expose end-user API with an access :
http://docker:8000/person/2016-4987649-53
• Add JWT and upstream Basic Auth plugin
• Add JWT authentication :
• Check personId correlation between JWT and URI parameter (see
plugin code)
• Which consumes EIS Thalys API with Basic Authentication
https://api.spawnrider.net/api/Person/2016-4987649-
53?personIdType=user&levelOfDetails=full
• My demo docker is available on Docker Hub

21. 21
Going further with Kong
Benefits and concerns
• Benefits
– Easy to install, configure and use
– Based on reliable products (Nginx, Cassandra, …)
– Not an ESB-based technical stack
– Well documented
• Concerns
– No OOTB Administration UI, Developer portal and Analytics platform
– Too technical for “non-tech” end-user / administrator

22. 22
Going further with Kong
Online materials
• Documentation
– https://getkong.org/
– https://getkong.org/plugins/
– https://getkong.org/docs/
• Videos & Webinars :
– Mashap Youtube Channel
– API & Microservices Management with Kong (Webinar)
– Microservices Orchestration with Kong, Galileo & Gelato
(Webinar)

23. 23
Contact
Yohann Ciurlik
Managing Solution Architect
Digital Customer eXperience (DCX)
Capgemini France
yohann.ciurlik@Capgemini.com
Also on Twitter or LinkedIn