Nearly four years ago, we open-sourced Kong and made it available to the world. Since then, Kong has been downloaded over 45 million times, been deployed in production at some of the largest companies and government agencies worldwide and attracted 110 open source contributors. Today, we’re proud to announce a critical milestone in our journey – Kong is going 1.0!

If you are familiar with Kong you might be asking, “Is Kong Community Edition (CE) or Kong Enterprise Edition (EE) going 1.0?” The answer is Community Edition, and that along with the release we’re changing the name of Kong CE to just plain Kong. Kong EE will now be called Kong Enterprise. The rename reflects the relationship that Kong and Kong Enterprise have always had to each other; Kong is the fully featured and production-grade foundation of Kong Enterprise.

What’s new in 1.0?

Kong 1.0 signals the maturity of the project and also includes major feature updates and minor enhancements created in response to overwhelming community demand.

Support for Service Mesh

Kong 1.0 provides support for Service Mesh deployment patterns enabled by the addition of mutual Transport Layer Security (TLS) between Kong instances, and modifications to the plugin run loop. These changes allow Kong to be deployed alongside each instance of a service, brokering information flow between services and automatically scaling as those services scale.

Migrations

The second enhancement in Kong 1.0 is a new Database Abstraction Object (DAO), which eases any necessary migrations from one database schema to another with minimal to zero downtime when you upgrade to a new version of Kong. The new DAO also allows users to upgrade their Kong cluster all at once, without requiring manual intervention to upgrade each node sequentially.

Other Updates and Improvements

Small but extremely popular improvements include a name property for routes and the addition of HTTPS health checks.

Why 1.0 now?

People often ask us why we hadn’t already labeled Kong 1.0. For most projects 1.0 means “ready for production”. Kong, however, has been in production at scale with leading companies and organizations across the world for several years. For Kong, 1.0 means that our API is established and backward compatible, and that future improvement will add to (rather than change) current functionality.

The release of the Plugin Development Kit (PDK), removal of leftover API entities, and the new 1.0 capabilities below allow us to guarantee that Kong is not only stable and production ready, but that we are ready for the next phase in our journey.

What’s Next?

We are all very excited about the progress that we have made to date, and are looking forward to the next decade of platform innovation driven by the Kong community, our fellow Kongers, and the ever-growing list of Kong users who put Kong to the test every day. We are incredibly grateful to everyone involved so far and look forward to building the future of Kong with you.

Download Kong 1.0.0rc1 and put it through its paces in preparation for GA. In the meantime join us for our first-ever community call on September 25th where you will be able to ask Principal Engineer Thibault Charbonnier your questions about 1.0.