Mashape, an API marketplace processing API requests and distributing APIs trusted by more than 140k developers worldwide, has unveiled Kong, an API and microservices management layer it has been using for 3 years. Much talk around it being released is absolutely fair, as Kong both centralizes and allows to expand a vast functionality with a simple command. Hence, it deserves to be entitled “the easiest way to secure, manage & extend” APIs.
Kong is perfect for those who build for web, mobile or Internet of Things (IoT) apps because it allows managing logging, authentication, data encryption, etc. in one place. There is no more need to deal with common functionality duplicated across multiple services and suffer inefficient productivity due to system constraints. One of the major pros of Kong is being powerful enough to support 20,000 API calls per second thanks to the proxy server from NGINX and the NoSQL Cassandra database.
Kong has a RESTful interface that can be operated with an API working with such methods as POST, GET, PUT, HEAD, DELETE, and PATCH, which provides maximum flexibility. Being plugin-oriented, it ‘implants’ great functionality to your API. For example, Kong cares for API security and offers to choose an authentication scheme that you believe to be best whether it is basic authentication, key one or CORS.
One more optional thing is logging. You can log requests and response data to a TCP server, a UDP server or Kong Log File that can be found at NGINX_WORKING_DIR/logs/error.log There is also a possibility to empower APIs with rate limiting, request transformer and third-party NGINX plugins.
Mashape aims to grow a Kong community that would become a source of requests and plugins produced by its members. Developers and API creators are encouraged to be a “part of the movement.” Yet among the community resources listed are Google group, Gitter chatroom, and Github page where they can find information on how to contribute to the code and documentation.
Developers can find Kong Core and Kong OSS Plugins free at their disposal whereas Enterprise Edition has much more to offer for a custom price.
