The company Kong has released version 2.0 of the microservices gateway of the same name. The list of new features is long. In addition to new functions for Go plug-ins, this also includes options for loading OS certificates and buffering.

Kong is as Service control platform has been developed. It is intended to combine artificial intelligence, machine learning and other technologies to convey the flow of information to and from services. Kong is based on the reverse proxy server Nginx. The platform provides services including a REST API interface for registering APIs and a platform for plug-ins.

Extended support for UDP Kong already supports HTTP / HTTPS traffic with REST and gRPC APIs. Kong Gatway 2.2 extends support for all UDP-based protocols (User Datagram Protocol). The development team behind the API gateway sees new opportunities for Kong users as UDP is used in a wide range of applications, from audio / video streaming and game servers to financial services.

Support for UDP includes proxying, load balancing and the execution of plug-ins. The Kong team aims to provide users with similar functions over UDP as are already available for the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). Those interested can find out more in a demo of the new feature shown by Kong Engineer Datong Sun.

Kong Engineer Datong Sun shows the support for UDP in action at the Kong Online Meetup.

New functions for Go plug-ins Another feature should be of interest to developers who use Go to create custom plug-ins for Kong. Kong 2.0 started with support for Go – Kong Gateway 2.2 is now expanding the range of functions.

Where Kong previously only supported reading request data, the API gateway with the current version reads when running Go Plug-ins the upstream response and forwards it to the Go plug-ins by means of a new response callback. This enables developers, for example, to read headers from the response from the upstream service and to use this data to execute custom plug-in logic.

Configuration attributes for buffering By setting configuration attributes, developers can set themselves whether they want to activate or deactivate the buffering of requests and responses on a per-route basis .

This was a static configuration until the update. With the new attributes, users can customize Kong’s buffering behavior for each endpoint. The goal is to achieve optimal latency for endpoints with heavy loads. Kong provides a demo to illustrate this.

Automatic loading of OS certificates The new functions of Kong Gateway 2.2 also include the automatic loading of certificates that are preinstalled with the Operating System (OS). The configuration option to set the certificate file to be used now accepts multiple entries as well as a special value that corresponds to the path of the certificate file bundled with the operating system.

The development team wants to make it easier to use HTTPS Support services on the Internet (outside the firewall) and at the same time be able to provide custom certificates for internal services. More information about the release can be found in the post on the official blog of Kong.

(mdo)