Introduction to Kong, an open-source cloud-native, fast, scalable, and distributed API Gateway.

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