An easy-to-integrate tool with good scalability features
What is our primary use case?
My company gave Kong Enterprise to only one company in the manufacturing sector, and now we are in talks with another manufacturing company.
Kong Enterprise is very useful, especially for IoT applications. Palo Alto Networks is also good for IoT applications. Kong Enterprise has a great licensing model. I am scanning capabilities, making it a good tool for infrastructures.
What needs improvement?
In comparison to Fortinet, Kong Enterprise fails to offer a huge number of ports in lower models of the solution. From an improvement perspective, the number of ports in lower models of the solution should be made available.
The GUI of the product is not very user-friendly, making it in areas where improvements are required. In Fortinet, the GUI allows users to deal directly with the configuration part.
The product's price is an area of concern where improvements are required.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have experience with Kong Enterprise.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It is a stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.
High-end models are available for large-scale businesses, but the same models are not available for small or medium-sized businesses.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The tool's scalability is good.
My company has around 300 to 500 users of the product.
How are customer service and support?
The solution's technical support is good.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I have experience with SonicWall and Fortinet. I chose Kong Enterprise since it is better in areas like throughput. The tool is also not easily vulnerable and provides patch updates.
How was the initial setup?
The product's initial setup phase was straightforward.
The deployment process was good. The product could be deployed in two to three hours.
Around seven to ten people, consisting of managers, engineers, managers, and developers, take care of the deployment and maintenance of the product.
What about the implementation team?
The product can be deployed with the help of our company's in-house members.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
There is a need to pay towards the licensing charges. My company also needs to make payments to use SD-WAN, which is usually an in-built feature in other products. In some areas, the functionalities are available free of charge.
What other advice do I have?
In our organization's workflow, we use Kong Enterprise since it helps the research and development team to check for certain updates, send patches, and scan for viruses, making it a good product.
Kong Enterprise's plug-in systems have enhanced our company's API management solution since they allow users to generate reports easily. My company hasn't worked to a great extent with the API management part of the tool.
The full-fledged features of the product are only available in the high-end models. For small and medium-sized businesses, not many ports are available for use. In SonicWall, if you take one box with the full software subscription and get another box with no software subscription, it would still offer HA, but in Palo Alto Networks, both boxes have to be the same.
I recommended the product to those who plan to use it.
I rate the ability of Kong Enterprise to match our organizational demands in terms of performance and scalability at a seven to eight out of ten.
It is easy to integrate Kong Enterprise with existing systems and infrastructures.
The benefit of using the solution is that I feel my network is more secure.
I rate the overall tool a seven out of ten.
It's great & reliable to use
What do you like best about the product?
It's best in connection pool (i.e connection is good ), as compare to usage it is great as compared to other API
What do you dislike about the product?
Nothing as such of now I seen in my experience
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
I have created portal for api, manage them and adjust for scaling
Best Cloud Native API Platform
What do you like best about the product?
Kong API Gateway is valued for its scalability and flexibility, with open-source architecture, extensive plugin support, and a vibrant community. It excels in managing, securing, and optimizing API traffic
What do you dislike about the product?
Some users find the initial setup and configuration of Kong API Gateway to be complex and challenging
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Kong API Gateway addresses challenges in managing, securing, and optimizing API traffic, providing benefits such as enhanced scalability, flexibility in deployment, robust performance monitoring, and a customizable architecture through plugins. It streamlines API management, fostering improved reliability, security, and overall efficiency in handling diverse and complex API ecosystems.
Robust API management solution offering scalability, resilience, cloud-agnostic deployment capabilities and powerful and adaptable gateway services
What is our primary use case?
It serves as an API gateway and microservices management platform, facilitating the creation, deployment, and oversight of APIs and microservices. It serves as a solution for measuring requests, managing upstreams, and handling internal APIs within the bank.
What is most valuable?
It is an excellent tool for managing data. It boasts remarkable speed and stability, and these qualities, particularly the gateway's resilience, are standout features for me. The shared features are also commendable. One of the aspects I appreciate is the effective rate limiting, achieved through the use of the throttling plugin for our APIs. Additionally, the straightforward automated deployment process for the gateway makes it exceptionally easy for everyone on the team to adapt without complications.
What needs improvement?
I find that expressing information can be a bit challenging, especially for those who are new to installing email configs or using it for the first time. Understanding the configurations and knowing what needs to be done can be a bit difficult initially.
For how long have I used the solution?
It is a crucial part of my daily workflow.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I encounter no issues with deployments, and it reliably performs its duties on a daily basis. It proves to be both resilient and stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It's scalable to your needs, and if you have the financial resources, you can scale it as much as you want.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Before adopting Kong, I utilized X-ray, which is another API gateway. I believe the strength of Kong lies in its agnostic nature. It allows deployment across various cloud environments, providing flexibility for implementation in any infrastructure. It is inherently cloud-native, enabling deployment and maintenance on platforms such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. This sets it apart from other gateways that may not offer the same level of versatility.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup is relatively easy, but it requires a clear idea of your objectives.
What about the implementation team?
When it comes to deployment, my team and I handle the entire process. We are responsible for managing all aspects of it. It is possible to deploy it within ten minutes in a cloud-native environment using our current CI process.
What other advice do I have?
My advice is to approach it with careful consideration. While it is a powerful tool, gaining expertise is crucial. It's essential to try it out firsthand, build confidence that Kong aligns with your requirements, and recognize its reliability as a gateway. In my experience, it has proven to be a top choice. If you encounter challenges, I recommend visiting the website and delving into the documentation, as it often holds solutions for various scenarios. Overall, I would rate it eight out of ten.
I use kong for production applications
What do you like best about the product?
It has all the features for terminating ssl, rate limiting and also all the metrics
What do you dislike about the product?
Learning curve. And othen than that i don't have anything
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
it has the UI to manage configuration
Common API Gateway
What do you like best about the product?
Kong is just a common API Gateway, portable, similar to API Gee. The fast way that process petitions is the thing i like most
What do you dislike about the product?
Is not easy, and in some cases not possible, to develop custom policies for hard bussiness logic
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Designed for passthroug APIs from my point of view and some out of the ox transformations
Unlocking Seamless API Management
What do you like best about the product?
I like best part of Kong API Gateway is its high performance and versatility, making it exceptionally well-suited for Cloud Native and DevOps-oriented architectures. And also best part is its open-source nature which will support for various deployment modes.
What do you dislike about the product?
I dislike main thing about Kong API Gateway is it's absence of an Analytics & Monitoring. Also for enterprise version licensing model is complex.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Kong API Gateway is helpful for us in streamlining the process by efficiently handling access control, security, and monitoring of our in-house APIs.
Its scalability features enables us to handle large API traffic volumes, which ensures optimal performance of our api services. It's load balancing capabilities contribute to our improved system scalability and resilience.
Kong API - A great tool for API Gateway
What do you like best about the product?
Performance, Easy to use and manage. Ease of Integration
What do you dislike about the product?
the documentation lacking in clarity or depth, making it challenging to troubleshoot issues or implement advanced configurations.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Unified API Management: Kong acts as a centralized entry point for managing APIs, providing a unified interface to control authentication, rate limiting, logging, and other functionalities. This streamlines API management, making it easier to monitor and control API traffic. Traffic Control and Monitoring: Kong enables rate limiting, caching, and throttling, controlling the flow of traffic to APIs. It also provides monitoring and analytics tools to track API usage, performance, and errors.
DevOps and Cloud Native API Gateway
What do you like best about the product?
Kong is a very high-performance opensource API Gateway particularly suitable for Cloud Native and DevOps Oriented architectures, it is suitable for installation on different architectures both in on-premise, cloud and hybrid modes. It is a complete product also includes Insomnia as an API Test and Designer tool and also, in the enterprise version, a Developer Portal also oriented towards IaC and the development of APIs from an API First perspective.
The hybrid installation via Kong Konnect is very quick and powerful and allows you to outsource all management except for the dataplanes which are installed on-premise and managed remotely. The on-premise version is easy to install. It can eb configured both via web interface and through a declarative configuration as well. In terms of support, the Enterprise version offers very fast and efficient support.
It supports native CLI tools to launch test and deploy configuration in your CI/CD pipelines
What do you dislike about the product?
Although it offers a rich set of plugins that easily integrates with tools like Prometeus, DataDog, Zipkin lacks an Analytics & Monitoring API tool. There is no management of Monteziation API.
For the Enterprise version the licensing model is a bit complicated because it depends on the number of invocations but also on the concept of gateway service, which is not always easy to keep under control.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Create a complete API Management platform that safely manages APIs, implements authentication and authorization and governance logics and which, in particular through automation tools, allows fast integration with CI/CD tools both in the development of traditional and in the development of APIs created on Kubernetes (via KIC Kubernetes Ingress Controller)
Solid API Gateway
What do you like best about the product?
Super easy to setup in a cloud provider or even as a container running in your own network, exposing which services you want to the outside world.
Pretty easy to configure and maintain, has good documentation, and a good community around.
What do you dislike about the product?
Open source version is somewhat limited.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Services with different runtimes are easily plugged into and served from the gateway, not limiting the tech stack.
User and access management is outside the services and its databases, and no need for extra cloud providers' services.
