Kong Inc., a California-based cloud infrastructure scaling software company, recently announced that they have raised $100 million in a new funding round. This funding will help Kong expand their existing software solutions to help businesses manage, secure, and scale their cloud infrastructure.
In this article, we will take a closer look at what these cloud solutions can do for businesses and the advantages of using Kong’s software.
Overview of Kong’s software
Using several modern technologies, Kong’s software is a cloud-native and open-source platform for managing and scaling APIs, microservices, and web applications. Kong software helps developers to quickly build, manage and secure APIs across multiple platforms. Kong’s software supports traditional protocols such as RESTful requests and more modern approaches like gRPC. In addition, it features an intuitive interface, plugins for advanced functionality (such as authentication or rate-limiting), health checks and monitoring, a plugin development framework and much more.
The software’s architecture is designed around containers and enables an easy deployment of services on all cloud providers. This helps to greatly accelerate the entire process of getting applications up and running in the cloud with minimal downtime. The Kong platform consists of three main components: Kong Gateway which handles traffic routing; Kong Manager which monitors traffic performance; and Kong Plugins which add additional functionality beyond the core components. These components can be used with custom plugins to customise the system according to specific needs or applications.
Kong’s software supports horizontal scaling by automatically adding new nodes when needed or manually scaling (adding single nodes). This feature significantly reduces operational costs of managing multiple clouds simultaneously by streamlining their administration on one platform without compromising security protocols or burdensome onboarding processes for developers. Additionally, its self-healing capability means that failed instances within a cluster will be replaced without manual intervention from an administrator. In this way, organisations can quickly scale their infrastructure without worrying about costly downtimes due to system malfunctions or outages caused by poorly managed infrastructure environments.
Benefits of using Kong’s software
Kong’s software provides businesses with powerful automation and analytics for their cloud infrastructure. It helps teams quickly establish, maintain, and scale infrastructures to meet customer demands quickly. By leveraging the latest technologies, Kong empowers businesses to stay competitive in this rapidly changing landscape.
Kong provides organisations with several useful benefits that can help organisations increase their cloud scalability, reliability and efficiency. Specifically, these benefits include:
-A single platform: With one platform that covers all infrastructure requirements, organisations can more easily coordinate operations at a large scale while utilising the latest technology. This allows them to leverage their existing tools while rapidly deploying new applications as they become available.
-Scalability: Kong’s software enables businesses to quickly and easily scale their infrastructure according to customer demands and enables teams of engineers to work collaboratively when scaling up or down resources associated with certain cloud services. Additionally, the single platform enables users to manage many servers across multiple clouds and automatically react when user traffic or other conditions require changes in real time without needing manual intervention from IT staff members.
-Reliability: Kong’s software goes beyond providing scalability by helping teams build resilient applications that remain online even if certain components fail momentarily due to an issue or glitch. Additionally, its automated backup/restore technology helps administrators restore lost data from any server in case of an unexpected crash due to unpredictable events or power outages.
-Reduced costs: By helping administrators reduce complexity in large cloud projects while also automating manual tasks such as service provisioning on multiple clouds and performance monitoring—Kong’s software significantly cuts down costs associated with managing complex infrastructures outside of team members’ workloads which enable engineers to remain more productive throughout the development cycle.
Kong raises $100 million for software that scales cloud infrastructure
Kong recently raised $100 million to help fund their software that helps businesses scale their cloud infrastructure. This funding round was led by Index Ventures, bringing Kong’s total funding to $200 million.
This funding will further develop Kong’s software to help businesses deploy, scale, and manage their cloud infrastructure more efficiently. But, first, let’s take a closer look at Kong’s funding and the software it will use.
Details of the $100 million funding round
On April 4th, 2020, Kong Inc., a provider of open-source enterprise platform for cloud infrastructure and services management, announced that it had closed a new $100 million Series D funding round. TPG Growth led this round with participation from existing investors GV (formerly Google Ventures), Index Ventures and Matrix Partners.
According to the company, this new funding will be used to expand its product suite and globally deploy its cloud platform and services to meet growing customer demand. Specifically, this funding will enable Kong to double down on its partnerships delivering API gateway functions and build more comprehensive microservices delivery capabilities such as API lifecycle management, serverless functions & portable workloads.
Kong also declared that it is cash flow positive since early 2019 due to strong growth in recurring revenue over the past year. In addition, it continues to experience record bookings growth quarter-over-quarter in 2020 largely fueled by expanding customer base. With a clear path to long term financial success, this new round of capital was most important for the company’s ability to expand further into new markets worldwide while continuing R&D investments into existing products and future advancements in API technology.
Investors and strategic partners
Kong, Inc. has attracted investors and strategic partners to help the company grow. Investors bring news funds to Kong in order to help the company increase production capacity and market share. With this funding, Kong can continue innovating and expanding its solutions marketplace. In addition, strategic partners will often join forces with Kong to offer customers exclusive joint solutions that capitalise on the strengths of both companies. By forming these strategic partnerships, Kong can become an even more attractive offering for potential customers looking for a one-stop shop for all their cloud solutions needs.
Kong’s investors and strategic partners include various venture capital firms, software companies, cloud infrastructure giants, telecommunications providers and more from the technology industry. These firms include Accel, Index Ventures, August Capital Partners and Google Cloud Platforms Accelerator Program. The variety of partners from across different industries indicates that cloud infrastructure technologies are being seen as a nicety and an essential source for future innovation in several business sectors including finance and health care IT systems as well as consumer services like teleconferencing services.
Bolstered by such reliable investors and business partnerships , Kong can progress quickly in providing comprehensive enterprise cloud infrastructure products and services that can meet the ever increasing demands of businesses worldwide..
Kong’s Software Features
Kong is an enterprise-grade software that helps businesses scale up their cloud infrastructure. With Kong, businesses can use sophisticated routing and API microservices tailored to their needs. Kong’s software also supports an extensive collection of plugins, providing companies access to numerous features that make cloud infrastructure management easier.
In this article, we’ll look at some of the features that make Kong’s software so powerful.
Cloud-native API management
Kong’s cloud-native API management capabilities make managing, securing, and monitoring your cloud infrastructure easy. Kong combines Microservices API Gateways, Security and Authentication with monitoring, logging and analytics tools in a simple, easy-to-configure platform. With Kong, organisations can provide uniform access control to APIs across public and private clouds, secure cloud applications from DDoS attacks and other potential threats, collect API usage insights for reporting purposes and identify areas for optimization.
Kong comes with robust traffic control features that offer enhanced security for your APIs by allowing you to define quotas for request rates per user or group, set limits on rate of requests over time or set rate limit overrides. This helps you ensure that authorised users only access APIs and that no single user or groups of users can overwhelm the system.
Kong also comes with flexible policy enforcement so you can set up rules based on the end user’s identity, environment or other attributes. This allows you to easily enforce authentication (OAuth2/OpenID Connect/Azure AD) requirements and access policies such as rate limiting requests over time or blocking malicious IP addresses from accessing the system. Finally Kong provides monitoring tools such as Service Discovery & Endpoint Health Checks so you can keep track of your Cloud Infrastructure performance in real time.
Service mesh and observability
Kong’s service mesh is a feature that integrates directly with Kubernetes and Kubernetes-native services. It offers a layer of abstraction that makes it easier for teams to orchestrate application services, define and enforce security policies, and monitor their performance. By leveraging Kong’s service mesh, businesses can reduce the complexity of managing distributed applications while enjoying enhanced visibility over application performance.
Kong’s service mesh also works with its observability features, including log analysis, request logging and performance metrics. With this information in hand monitoring is made easier and businesses can detect any potential issues or errors quickly before they cause a major disruption. In addition to providing valuable insights into the health of services running within a given environment, Kong’s observability features can be used to isolate code problems which helps dev teams quickly remediate errors that could otherwise lead to costly downtime.
Security and authentication
Security and authentication are key components of Kong’s software. As companies are scaling their cloud infrastructure, managing and securing access to those resources is essential. Kong’s security features enable businesses to secure their applications through sophisticated authentication protocols without compromising availability.
Kong provides token-based authentication methods like OAuth 2 and JSON Web Tokens (JWT) for granular access control over services like Kubernetes and Docker containers. Tokens also provide strong relief from brute-force attacks as they are short-lived by design and will automatically expire after a certain period. Additionally, IP whitelisting further restricts incoming requests, allowing users to block any malicious or unfamiliar traffic from accessing their internal networks. This can drastically reduce the risk of advanced persistent threats that may have gone unseen.
Additional security features include rate limiting, which allows users to control the number of requests a service can receive within a minute or day, and SSL/TLS encryption that offers an extra layer of protection when securely transferring data between different services within a company’s infrastructure. Finally, with Kong Insights customers can gain greater visibility into their services with end-to-end monitoring across all environments—from AWS to Kubernetes clusters—that includes insights into latency outliers and error codes at no additional cost.
Kong’s Impact on Businesses
Kong has raised over $100 million for a software designed to help businesses scale their cloud infrastructure. This software promises to provide businesses with an easy, reliable and secure way to manage their cloud infrastructure.
This article will discuss the potential impact of Kong and its software on businesses.
Cost savings
One of the main benefits that businesses can obtain by leveraging Kong’s solutions is cost savings. As Kong’s software simplifies the scaling of cloud infrastructure, businesses can drastically reduce their costs in server hardware and personnel for managing them. In addition, it eliminates the need to buy, install and maintain servers and costly personnel to handle routine IT operations.
This frees up resources and capital for other investments directly related to business growth like marketing and product development. Additionally, Kong also services on-demand scaling so businesses can increase/decrease their current resource levels on demand which assists in avoiding over or underestimating capacity requirements when planning for future needs.
Improved scalability
Organisations utilising Kong as a service mesh platform enjoy improved scalability. This is because the distributed nature of control planes and sidecar proxies in a service mesh architecture suggest that service-level scalability is handled more transparently than traditional monolithic applications. In addition, instead of relying on increasing capacity of main application servers, with Kong, roles and responsibilities can be divided between services, allowing businesses to decrease business costs by handling more traffic with fewer resources.
Companies also benefit from enhanced hackability, or the ability to add new features quickly. This makes it easier for developers to build services without overriding existing code. Developers can also easily extend standalone services that eliminate hassle of managing enterprise-level architectures.
Overall, businesses implementing Kong reap improved scalability and hackability benefits.
Increased agility
Kong helps businesses scale their cloud infrastructure quickly and securely. By using Kong’s cloud-native software solution, companies can increase the agility of their architecture and enable scalability in response to traffic changes and new development. Kong offers a range of solutions for businesses – virtual private networks, traffic analytics, API gateway and management, service mesh and monitoring. In addition, the platform is easy to use and allows developers and IT professionals to quickly reconfigure their system as needed.
Kong also ensures enterprises control resources while they scale up or down. For example, with its streamlined architecture, companies can easily maintain control over access permissions without adding additional complexity that may lead to elevated risk levels or increased attack surface size.Thanks to these benefits, business owners can easily increase the scalability of their servers with minimal effort so when demand rises for an organisation’s services or products it can meet customer needs without delays.
The associated cost savings associated with efficient server utilisation are secondary benefits that Kong offers organisations that use the platform. Businesses achieve higher performance at lower costs because they’re able to reduce redundant spending on hardware upkeep while taking advantage of advanced features such as caching, dynamic service scaling, real-time container orchestration monitoring, troubleshooting analysis patterns recognition algorithms all under one unified platform. This combination of technology provides business owners with all the necessary tools required for operating mission-critical applications efficiently while also allowing them to take advantage of potential cost savings opportunities whenever possible.
tags = Kong, raises $100 million, cloud infrastructure, APIs and microservices, kong apis 100m tiger global 1.4bbrienventurebeat, cloud-based services, Tiger Global Management
