
Kong Raises $43M in Series C Funding - merqurio
https://konghq.com/press-release/kong-raises-43-million
======
jordanbeiber
Seems like many people are not familiar with openresty off which kong is
based.

[https://openresty.org/en/](https://openresty.org/en/)

Kong is like an enterpise version of openresty, i.e nginx turbo-charged with
luajit. A lot of really cool and performant things can be built on top of it.

At a previous place we wanted to implement an auth & rate limiting ingress to
a consul based service discovery.

We looked at kong but in the end rolled our own using openresty.

No one on the team really liked the ”centralised” approach used by kong. It’s
probably preferred in an older schooled enterprise setting tho (awesome
project non the less!)

~~~
lovehashbrowns
I once had to implement a giant ip address blacklist for an api in the fastest
and cheapest way possible. Openresty and redis saved me that day. That has
been my favorite project that I've ever worked on. Two amazing pieces of
software. Kong is great, too. We were just unable to use it because its
blacklist feature wasn't easy to implement.

~~~
fosk
What problems did you specifically encounter with the current bundled
blacklist plugin?

~~~
lovehashbrowns
This was about 3 years ago. We needed to get millions of IP addresses into the
blacklist, with daily updates. We tried using Cassandra for the backed. Not
sure if it's easier now but yeah that would have been more of a pain to
accomplish.

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wlesieutre
The only "Kong" I know of is the one that makes rubber pet toys. I was very
confused when I read this headline.

~~~
robmccoll
This was also my immediate thought. Naming is hard. Globally unique names that
actually convey something about what you do, are recognizable, and sound
pleasant to speakers of most languages seems even harder.

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hodder
I've never heard of this company, but I'd like to say I really think the
graphic designer who came up with the logo really nailed it.

~~~
mikejulietbravo
No doubt!

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cryptica
Yes! I've been looking everywhere for a complex bundle of enterprise vaporware
for my company to get permanently locked into. I love the crispy crust of
enterprise complexity wrapped around a delicious warm gooey open source core.

~~~
fosk
Most of the Kong adoption is free and comes from the open-source version,
which you can download for free [1] and perhaps even contribute to [2]. We
support an extensibility framework [3] that the community has been using to
extend Kong (more than 500+ plugins on GitHub), including about 30 plugins
that are shipped for free in the open-source distribution [4].

Kong is modular by design so that we could walk away from bundled complexity,
and that's really why we created the concept of Plugins. Plugins can be
installed, distributed, and used independently and they can be removed anytime
(not just disabled, but entirely removed from the actual runtime).

[1] - [https://konghq.com/install/](https://konghq.com/install/)

[2] - [https://github.com/Kong/kong](https://github.com/Kong/kong)

[3] - [https://docs.konghq.com/latest/plugin-
development/](https://docs.konghq.com/latest/plugin-development/)

[4] - [https://docs.konghq.com/hub/](https://docs.konghq.com/hub/)

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rsp1984
I frankly have no clue about enterprise IT but the funding and their growth
sound impressive. Would someone ELI5 to me what problem Kong solves (bonus
points for business model because it sounds like Kong is Open Source)?

~~~
mikejulietbravo
Disclosure: I work at Kong.

The simplest way to think of Kong is as a piece of software that controls
traffic going in and out of an API. At its simplest form, it helps make sure
that traffic gets to the right API, is secure, etc.

Where Kong really differentiates itself is its ability to support
decentralized software architecture patterns like microservices, service mesh,
etc as well as traditional monoliths, regardless of the underlying platform or
hardware. Microservices make deploying software a lot faster, and we're the
connective tissue that lets those microservices work together smoothly and
with older legacy systems.

Kong is indesed open source. We also have an enterprise version that adds a
lot of features that make managing kong in an enterprise much easier.

~~~
netok
Even basic features like proxy caching is locked behind enterprise version. No
thanks.

~~~
bungle
I think you are raising a valid point. What is considered a basic feature is a
constantly moving target. The proxy-caching in Kong Enterpise is implemented
as a plugin, and it is not that complex. All our new plugins are developed
outside Kong open source repository. Some of them are public and some are
private. Some of them we include in our default packaging. Ultimately this is
a product decision. I think we have some features in open source that could
have been enterprise only, and vice versa. I work mostly on developing the
Kong core (open source), but at the same time, I think that having a healthy
business, will help the open source too. Who knows, your wish of proxy caching
plugin , we will endup moving from enterprise to open source.

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bogomipz
I didn't realize that Kong is far more than just a load balancer now. Given
that are they basically an alternative to Istio then?

~~~
mikejulietbravo
Kong is indeed a lot more than just a load balancer or proxy. We provide an
ecosystem of functionality on top of high performance proxy core to allow you
to better manage how your APIs, services, and applications interact with each
other and with the world.

You could use us as an alternative to Istio, or you could integrate us with
Istio. We provide additional control capabilities on top of what Istio does,
and also service decentralized and centralized deployments. Basically, you
could use Istio for a mesh (or use kong for the same mesh) and then use Kong
to connect all your legacy apps and services into the same control platform.
That way, you get global visibility and control at multiple layers - so you
can get as granular as you want or as macro as you want.

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hylaride
There's a lot of people getting a lot of money from/via nginx lately...

~~~
awinder
Hopefully this isn't made into a problem that doesn't really exist ala
elastic, redis, etc. To me this is a real opensource success story --
openresty / the lua bits of nginx that came out of taobao really upped the
level of what you could do with nginx. Kong is a huge, nontrivial addition
that builds on top of that work, the result of carving out a product focus
area and really iterating on what businesses / enterprises need. This is
really the best of open source, IMO.

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piotrkubisa
Is there any Kong as a Service? Is there any advantage to use it in front of
VPS instances like DO or Vultr?

~~~
mikejulietbravo
Kong Cloud is a SaaS version of Kong Enterprise.

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gengstrand
I used to like Kong a lot but I noticed that it started under performing when
they released version 1. I blogged about that in
[http://glennengstrand.info/software/performance/springboot/d...](http://glennengstrand.info/software/performance/springboot/dropwizard)

~~~
bungle
Do you mean under performing as in proxying performance? We do know there are
some code paths that need to be optimized. For 1.2 we will be working on those
issues, and for many of them, we already have solutions (in many cases more
than one approach). A warmed up Kong usually runs with sub-millisecond
latency, the plugins can usually add more to it, but sure there are rough
edges, especially in p99. We'll just need to pick up the best ideas that have
already been proposed, either by us or our community. For some issues we have
a public pull requests in place for discussion. And some of them we have
developed in close collaboration with the community or customers. We sure want
to be lean and fast. Especially now that Kong is used as a sidecar proxy in
service mesh.

~~~
gengstrand
The load test would call kong which would proxy each request to the service
being tested. Kong would be configured with the http-log plugin where
performance data would get sent to another service that would collect that
data then update elasticsearch in bulk.

Last August, I tested the Dropwizard service with this setup which recorded
about 20,000 RPM on GKE. This year, the same setup sent about 4,000 RPM to the
Dropwizard service and the http-log plugin sent only about 200 RPM to the
other service.

~~~
bungle
Uh, that is a deep drop. Just thinking, could it be related to this:
[https://github.com/Kong/kong/commit/de4a002565a1723bff9014cb...](https://github.com/Kong/kong/commit/de4a002565a1723bff9014cb268811b96688af6b#diff-42179ec4ac8902bb7c13b1999a071e5d)

Definitely something for us to investigate! Thank you for feedback (I'll
collect this information to our backlog).

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username223
> Using AI and Machine Learning to Automate the Full API and Service
> Development Lifecycle, Kong Is Reinventing the Software Industry and
> Accelerating Global Innovation Cycles

I Literally Have No Idea What This Is, Even After Reading This Word Salad Of A
Press Release. But hey, they got $43 million...

~~~
trpc
neither Kong nor its infrastructure (i.e. nginx) have any future on the long
term against envoy. Simply time is against them even if it is going to be very
slow downfall. I guess that's the real reason nginx sold itself right in the
peak of the economic cycle and before envoy gets the sufficient popularity

~~~
rubiquity
Based only on technical merits I agree; Envoy and other API type
software/service should probably eat its lunch. At most enterprises though
nobody will have heard of Envoy though and I don't know of anyone selling
directly to enterprise in this space. However, investing in enterprise
infrastructure software is hardly about tech at somme point. The investors
must really like Kong's enterprise sales team.

~~~
trpc
there are already a handful commercial Envoy-based k8s ingress controllers

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purplezooey
"Where's the app hosted?"

"Kong."

"Hong Kong?"

"Yes."

"Which one?"

"Kong."

"You said Hong Kong."

"Kong."

"Where?"

"In Hong Kong."

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ethbro
Seems like a lot of money for dog toys.

------
trpc
>75+ million downloads

do founders really use these deceptive metrics in order to raise money from
investors? most of these downloads (docker, git or even npm) are simply
automated a zillion times by a much fewer number of projects

~~~
rubiquity
No the investors get the real numbers that we don't get. Number of customers,
customer acquisition costs, revenue, trailing growth, churn, etc. etc.

Reading anything other than the title in these types of posts are not worth
anyone's time.

