Kong 1.0 is now generally available with gRPC support, updated Database abstraction object and more

Yesterday, the team at Kong announced the general availability of Kong 1.0, a scalable, fast, open source microservice API gateway that manages hybrid and cloud-native architectures. Kong can be extended through plugins including authentication, traffic control, observability and more.The first stable version of Kong 1.0 was launched earlier this year in September at the Kong summit.

The Kong API creates a Certificate authority which Kong nodes can use for establishing mutual TLS authentication with each other. It can balance traffic from mail servers and other TCP-based applications, from L7 to L4.

What’s new in Kong 1.0?

gRPC

This release supports gRPC protocol alongwith REST. It is built on top of HTTP/2 and provides option for Kong users looking to connect east-west traffic with low overhead and latency. This helps in enabling Kong users to open more mesh deployments in hybrid environments.

New Migrations Framework in Kong 1.0

This version of Kong introduces a new Database Abstraction Object (DAO), a framework that allows migrations from one database schema to another with nearly zero downtime. The new DAO helps users to upgrade their Kong cluster all at once, without the need of any manual intervention for upgrading each node.

Plugin Development Kit (PDK)

PDK, a set of Lua functions and variables can be used by custom-plugins for implementing logic on Kong. The plugins built with the PDK will be compatible with Kong versions 1.0 and above. PDK’s interfaces are much easier to use than the bare-bones ngx_lua API. It allows users to isolate plugin operations such as logging or caching. It is semantically versioned which helps in maintaining backward compatibility.

Service Mesh Support

Users can now easily deploy Kong as a standalone service mesh. A service mesh can help address the challenges of microservices in terms of security. It secures the services as it integrates multiple layers of security with Kong plugins. It also features secure communication at every step of the request lifecycle.

Seamless Connections

This release connects services in the mesh to services across all environments, platforms, and vendors. Kong 1.0 can be used to bridge the gap between cloud-native design and traditional architecture patterns.

Robust plugin architecture

This release comes with a robust plugin architecture that offers users unparalleled flexibility. Kong plugins provide key functionality and supports integrations with other cloud-native technologies including Prometheus, Zipkin, and many others. Kong’s plugins can now execute code in the new preread phase which improves performance.

AWS Lambda and Azure FaaS

Kong 1.0 comes with improvements to interactions with AWS Lambda and Azure FaaS, including Lambda Proxy Integration. The Azure Functions plugin can be used to filter out headers disallowed by HTTP/2 when proxying HTTP/1.1 responses to HTTP/2 clients.

Deprecations in Kong 1.0

Core

The API entity and related concepts such as the /apis endpoint have been removed from this release. Routes and Services are used instead.

The old DAO implementation and the old schema validation library are removed.

New Admin API

Filtering now happens withURL path changes (/consumers/x/plugins) instead of querystring fields (/plugins?consumer_id=x)

Error messages have been reworked in this release to be more consistent, precise and informative.

The PUT method has been reimplemented.

Plugins

The galileo plugin has been removed.

Some internal modules, that were used by plugin authors before the introduction of the Plugin Development Kit (PDK) in 0.14.0 have been removed now. Internal modules that have been removed include, kong.tools.ip module, kong.tools.public module and kong.tools.responses module.