Kong debuts Kong Event Gateway for managing real-time data streams

Kong Inc. today introduced Kong Event Gateway, a new tool for managing real-time data streams powered by Apache Kafka.

San Francisco-based Kong received a valuation of more than $2 billion in a funding round last year. It provides a platform called Konnect that helps develops build, manage and secure application programming interfaces. Kong says that its platform is used by more than 700 companies including multiple publicly traded tech firms.

The Kong Event Gateway that debuted today is available as part of Konnect. According to the company, customers can now use Konnect to manage both their APIs and Kafka-powered data streams. That removes the need to use two separate sets of management tools, which can ease day-to-day maintenance tasks.

Kafka makes it possible to create data streams called topics that connect to an application, detect when the application generates a new record and collect the record. Other workloads can subscribe to a topic to receive the records it collects. An e-commerce company, for example, could use Kafka to sync new orders from its shopping app to its backend inventory management tool.

Kong Event Gateway acts as an intermediary between an application and the Kafka data streams to which it subscribes. Before data reaches the application, it goes through the Kong Event Gateway. The fact that information is routed through the tool allows it to regulate how workloads access the information.

Using Kong Event Gateway, a company can require that applications perform authentication before accessing a Kafka data stream. The tool encrypts the records that are sent over the data stream to prevent unauthorized access. According to Kong, it doubles as an observability tool that enables administrators to monitor how workloads interact with the information transmitted by Kafka.

Kafka transmits data using a custom network protocol. According to Kong, Kong Event Gateway allows applications to access data via standard HTTPS APIs instead of the custom protocol. That eases development by sparing the need for software teams to familiarize themselves with Kafka’s information streaming mechanism.

There are situations where multiple applications may need to access the same Kafka data stream, but in different ways. For example, one application might require access to complete purchase logs while another may only need to know the value of transactions. Usually, developers have to create a separate copy of the data stream for each application to meet this requirement.

Kong Event Gateway allows multiple workloads to share the same data stream without the need for copies. Administrators can create separate data access permissions for each workload. Another feature, Virtual Clusters, allows multiple software teams to share the same Kafka cluster without gaining access to one another’s data.

“The ability to process real-time event data is imperative to many organizations, particularly in the financial, IoT and e-commerce space,” said Kong co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Marco Palladino. “We’re bringing the same governance, observability and security capabilities our customers leverage for APIs, microservices and AI to events.”

Kong Event Gateway is available today, and the native Kafka proxy option is currently in early access.

Image: Kong