Kong has released Kong Gateway (OSS) 2.5, the latest version of its microservice API gateway, available under an Apache 2.0 licence. This release adds a new testing framework, enhancements to its Hybrid Mode, and a number of plug-in improvements.

The Performance Testing Framework is designed to provide users with a convenient way of carrying out performance benchmarks on the Kong Gateway, to ensure it is operating within acceptable parameters. It will help in understanding the Gateway’s ability to, for example, handle requests per second on a specific EC2 instance. This will enable users to estimate hardware requirements more accurately and potentially save on costs.

According to the firm, the Framework is built into Kong Gateway’s existing integration testing approach, and makes developing performance tests easier. The company also provides some examples, available in the Kong Repository.

Future-proofing

This release also paves the way for some advanced features coming in the future. For example, Kong has made some changes to Hybrid Mode, under which Kong Gateway operates as a data plane that dynamically delegates request traffic for your APIs, and as a control plane to synchronise gateway configurations across multiple Kong Gateway data planes.

As part of these changes, control planes have become more lenient when checking the compatibility of data planes in Hybrid mode. Kong now automatically adds the correct certificates when operating in Hybrid Mode. Kong Gateway also now exposes an upstream health check endpoint on the data plane for better observability, using the status API.

Finally, Kong Gateway (OSS) 2.5 provides a number of plugin improvements. The Syslog plugin now includes facility configuration options, which enable the plugin to group error messages from different sources. The Prometheus plugin exposes the status of connected data planes onto the control plane, along with metrics to help with troubleshooting when data planes may have inconsistent configurations across the cluster.

Kong Gateway (OSS) 2.5 is available to download for free from a number of channels listed on the Kong web site.