Introducing Konnect
Konnect unifies and manages APIs, LLMs, events, and microservices with a single, centralized management plane, giving you consistent visibility and control across your entire API ecosystem. It uniquely combines a control plane, managed by Kong and hosted in the cloud, with the versatility of managing the data plane on your terms—either self-managed or through Kong, within your preferred network environment.
Konnect can help you with the following use cases:
- Easily manage Kong Gateway
- Catalog and publish APIs
- Achieve federated API management with multi-geo support
Applications
Konnect provides several built-in applications that run on top of the Konnect platform to help manage, monitor, and secure your API ecosystem, as well as provide a customizable developer experience.
Advanced Analytics
Advanced Analytics is a real-time, highly contextual analytics platform that provides deep insights into API health, performance, and usage.
Dev Portal
The Konnect Dev Portal is a customizable website for developers to locate, access, and consume API services.
Service Catalog
Service Catalog provides a centralized catalog of all services running in your organization.
Connectivity
The Konnect platform runs in hybrid mode and provides several hosted control plane options to manage all service configurations. The control plane propagates those configurations to the data plane group, which is composed of data plane nodes (and in the case of Kong Mesh, proxies). The individual nodes can be running either on-premise, in cloud-hosted environments, or fully managed by Konnect.
AI Gateway
Kong AI Gateway is a powerful set of AI features built on top of Kong Gateway, designed to help developers and organizations effectively adopt AI quickly and securely.
API Gateway
Gateway Manager is a Konnect module that lets you catalog, connect to, and monitor the status of all Kong Gateway control planes and data plane nodes in one place.
Service Mesh
Mesh Manager allows you to create, manage, and view your Kong Mesh service meshes using the Konnect platform.
Event Gateway (Beta)
KNEP is a proxy for the native Kafka protocol that sits between native consumers and producers, and backend Kafka clusters. It supports features such as cluster virtualization, authentication mediation, and encryption of message payloads and keys.
Konnect data plane hosting options
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Serverless gateway: Lightweight API gateways, where the control plane is hosted by Konnect and data plane nodes are automatically provisioned.
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Dedicated Cloud Gateways: Data plane nodes that are fully managed by Kong in Konnect. Each Dedicated Cloud Gateway runs on isolated infrastructure within Kong-managed environments in AWS, Azure, or GCP — offering the performance and security of dedicated infrastructure with the operational ease of SaaS.
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Self-hosted: Host your own data plane nodes on the supported system of your choice.
Tools to manage Konnect
- decK: Manage Kong Gateway configuration in Konnect through declarative state files
- Terraform: Manage infrastructure as code and automated deployments to streamline setup and configuration of Konnect, Kong Gateway, and Kong Mesh
- KIC: Manage ingress traffic and routing rules for your services
- Konnect APIs: Manage all aspects of the Konnect platform, applications, and runtimes using APIs
Security and user management in Konnect
Konnect authentication
Konnect offers multiple options for authentication. You can configure single sign-on with any SAML and OIDC provider or use built-in authentication.
Teams and roles
Create teams and roles within an organization and use them to distribute permissions.
Customer-Managed Encryption Keys (CMEK)
Customer-Managed Encryption Keys (CMEK) enhances privacy, security, and regulatory compliance by enabling customer-controlled encryption.
Konnect audit logging
Collect and review audit logs for both the Konnect org and Dev Portal.
Kong Identity (Beta)
Kong Identity enables you to generate, authenticate, and authorize API access using Konnect. It implements OAuth 2.0 with OpenID Connect and supports plugins like OpenID Connect, OAuth 2.0 Introspection, and Upstream OAuth.
How-to guides
- Rate limit a Consumer with Kong GatewayView →
- Create rate limiting tiers with Kong GatewayView →
- Rate limit a Gateway Service with Kong GatewayView →
- Adjust header names in a requestView →
- Allow clients to choose their authentication methods and prevent unauthorized accessView →
- Automatically create and manage Dev Portal applications in Auth0 with Dynamic Client RegistrationView →
- Authenticate Consumers with the JWT pluginView →
- View More →
Frequently asked questions
How do I get a Konnect license?
When you create a Kong Konnect account, Kong Gateway Enterprise, Kong Ingress Controller (KIC), and Kong Mesh licenses are automatically provisioned to your organization. You do not need to manage these licenses manually.
Any data plane nodes or Kong Ingress Controller associations configured through the Gateway Manager also implicitly receive the same license from the Kong Konnect control plane. You should never have to deal with a license directly.
For any license questions, contact your sales representative.