Kong raises $43M Series C for its API Gateway

https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/28/kong-raises-43m-series-c-for-its-api-platform/

by UkiahSmith • 7 years ago

66 32 7 years ago

etdev• 7 years ago

As someone who works as a software developer in Japan this is awesome. Kong is one of the few companies allowing remote work even outside of North America so I'm glad to see that they're growing.

blumomo2• 7 years ago

Can someone please explain me as a programmer, what value Kong could bring to my digital products?

jngreenlee• 7 years ago

Easy...coworking spaces have dogs, and often, 3D printers... With the new Kong (c) API (TM), you can dream up and print new toys on the spot with Kong's patented Toy Platform, King (TM).

Keep your dog happy allows you to be a better bro-grammer!

/Obvious /s/

SideburnsOfDoom6• 7 years ago

Well, do you need an API gateway in front of your http microservices? If you know what all of those things are, you might want Kong or one of its competitors.

Kong's engine is NGINX, so if you're happy configuring NGINX itself and that is good enough for you, you won't want Kong.

blumomo2• 7 years ago

Ah, so Kong basically brings all my different API servers together and provides a single API endpoint to the outside world instead of using customers learn about different endpoints in different servers?

michaelbuckbee• 7 years ago

This answer is a more "what value does an API Gateway provider bring" than Kong specific as it's been a couple of years since I did an in-depth comparison of the different options.

Say you have some developed kind of consumable service (think like fraud detection, geolocation, or machine learning recommendations, whatever) then using Kong or another API Gateway as a service type offering is a way to handle big chunks of all the boring but necessary infrastructure needed to bring that to market.

This is stuff like setting up plans, accepting payments, rate limiting, issuing and revoking api keys, docs, etc.

API Gateway's function like a proxy or CDN where api.example.com goes to blah.kong-api-service.com which then requests back to your-app-server.example.com so they're able to do these things without needing to get into your code.

duxup2• 7 years ago

Thank you.

I wish we had a little plain English summary like this for ... every company ;)

hobofan• 7 years ago

like setting up plans, accepting payments

I might be stupid here, but I have not seen any mention of Kong handling those things on their website.

avip• 7 years ago

An api gateway gives you all the hard to manage foundations of a publicly exposed production-grade api: rate limiting, multitenancy, pricing plans, monitoring, staging, and more, all at a predictable cost.

developer2• 7 years ago

As someone who has spent the past two years delving into Kubernertes and other Docker orchestration platforms, the answer is currently... "not much".

Kong does have a certain position in the industry (they are at least "known"), but their competition has done a better job taking market share. There are many API Gateways and Service Meshes trying to get their piece of the pie, and Kong has so far failed to be one of the true front runners. Products built on top of Envoy have so far done a better job of attracting users.

That isn't to say Kong can't try to assert themselves with another injection of cash. The industry is still very much up in arms, with all of us waiting for someone to step up and take over as the defacto gateway and/or mesh; preferably BOTH the gateway AND the mesh. Kubernetes itself is effectively the defacto standard, but the things you plug into it are certainly still in flux.

Bombthecat4• 7 years ago

I'm curious, which other commercial product offers service mesh on kubernetes / in from of microservices? Axway,IBM,red hat etc are all monolotiths and to big / slow for microservices.

Only other commercial firm I know of is crunch 42. And maybe you can count Salesforce api gateway.but they go a different way...

SideburnsOfDoom6• 7 years ago

This page has a reasonable explanation of where an API gateway fits in:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/microser...

taosx2• 7 years ago

Happy for them. I know that Kong uses openResty with which I have worked and I hope some of that money goes into it.

On another topic, why would I use Kong instead of it's competitors built on envoy and with higher integration with kubernetes? Maturity?

SideburnsOfDoom6• 7 years ago

why would I use Kong instead of it's competitors built on envoy and with higher integration with kubernetes?

If you have kubernetes, you might prefer that. But Kong is also useful in scenarios that don't involve kubernetes at all.

mikejulietbravo• 7 years ago

Disclosure - I work at Kong.

Kong has a native kubernetes ingress controller. A large portion of our customers use us with K8s

hbcondo7142• 7 years ago

Not to take anything away from Kong's accomplishment but this article was written 2 months ago. Here's the Press Release from Kong dated March 28th 2019:

https://konghq.com/press-release/kong-raises-43-million

hbcondo7142• 7 years ago

Previous discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19512025

seattle_spring• 7 years ago

When I first read the headline, I was surprised that the same maker of my dog's ultra-tough chew toys [1] was branching into tech B2B.

[1] https://www.kongcompany.com/

legohead• 7 years ago

Thought this was about Kongregate, which is often shortened to Kong.

jamisteven• 7 years ago

Seriously thought this was an article about Kong the dog toy company.

Kong raises $43M Series C for its API Gateway

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