Our primary use case of this solution was a secure API Gateway hosted on public cloud infrastructure. The manageability, deployment architecture options and scalability were key considerations. Kong is great at organising our API ecosystem and providing the required manageability, scalability observability and security.
I'm the vice president of technology and architecture and we are customers of Kong Enterprise.
Kong is our API and Micro-services backbone.
Simplicity, its plugin architecture and scalability.
The new Developer Portal, intercepting traffic and modeling APIs around that is great.
vibrant community support and an open source DNA
Kong has a huge community and lot of open source implementations and satisfied users.
The motivation to move to Enterprise edition is still license and cost based. Kong can look at different options like managed and Hosted PaaS, different consumption tiers to make the transition practical and easier.
I've been using Kong for the past 3+ years. Have done two opensource API Gateway Implementations. Evaluated and considered Enterprise edition more than once. No qualms or complaints. There open source version works for most of the cases. Solid product.
The stability is fine. We had one outage because of our own infrastructure operations. Other than that, from a stability perspective it runs smoothly because of the very good underlyingKong platform architecture.
Misconfigured plug-ins mess up your environment. Always have the configuration preserved or implement Kong using Terraform scripts or using other config as code options.
Kong is a super scalable product as far as my current experience goes. The scalability is awesome. We could scale up easily and could organise our as multiple clusters and secure them.
I believe the technical support is good although I haven't had to use it much.
Mulesoft, Tibco Mashery, Oracle SOA, webMethods,WsO2 and SAP products and all of them
The initial setup was relatively straightforward. There were some small issues with documentation. Deployment took a couple of weeks. One of the neat things about Kong is the huge community they have and there's a lot of help that comes from there. It gives you the plugins and solutions for you to be self-sufficient.
Implemented on our own
Zero Investment on open source version. It works like enterprise grade. The enterprise version has lot of great features. Interms of ROI it’s intangible, we could deliver APIs for business needs Ina very agile manner.
I'm not sure of the licensing costs because they like to keep it confidential. As far as I know their enterprise license is all or none one big bundle.
Well seen all of them.
Kong is a developer friendly, and ground up community supported platform.
I would highly recommend Kong, especially for people who are experiencing a cost bloat using other platforms. Great choice for startup, scale ups and enterprises.
I would rate this solution an 8 out of 10.
