Service control platform-to-be Kong Enterprise has begun adding intelligent automation and monitoring features into the mix.
On its way from API to service control platform, the Kong team looked into what benefits machine learning could deliver and came up with two new additions to their portfolio: Kong Brain and Kong Immunity.
While Brain will collect and analyse data to improve governance and visibility, Immunity will try to detect and learn from anomalies for monitoring purposes. According to the announcement, Brain will run through OpenAPI specification files to automate deployment configurations.
To make sure documentation is accurate, users can also let the feature ingest service data through a collector which then serves as a basis for new documentation Brain generates under the OpenAPI specification. New docs will be pushed to the Developer Portal which is part of the enterprise offering and if Brain is deployed in front of a service every service update will lead to a global documentation update. For better service discovery, Kong Brain is also able to generate service maps, which it will then use to learn about a deployment to at some point be able to point out redundancies etc.
Before getting helpful, Kong Immunity will first have to find out what healthy traffic looks like by ingesting data flowing through the project’s data plane. Since anomalies will be usually addressed by configuration changes, Immunity uses those to learn ways to react to anomalies, so that at some point it could make changes without getting directions.
Once a baseline has been established, Immunity can flag up deviations and alert whoever has been designated within Kong Manager. To make the process more helpful, users can feed the program information on typical patterns or traffic events and adjust alert sensitivity etc.
The features are planned to be rolled out over an early access period to get rid of any annoyances early adopters might run into.
Kong Enterprise is a commercial offering of the cloud-native API gateway and service mesh Kong, which is also available as an open source project on GitHub. The latter was released as v1.0 in September 2018, which also marked the renaming of the project’s editions (Kong and Kong Enterprise instead of Kong Community Edition and Enterprise Edition).
Kong serves as a gateway for microservice requests (service mesh, anyone?) and provides load balancing, authentication, and logging features amongst other things. The enterprise version comes with round-the-clock support, additional security measures, a GUI for admins, a developer portal, and analytics functions amongst others.