Kong Konnect the World: Seamless Global and Serverless Deployments Powered by Koyeb

Kong Konnect is an API lifecycle management platform streamlining the connectivity between your APIs and microservices. The control plane is hosted in the cloud by Kong and available across the US, EU, and AU, while the data plane is managed by you within your preferred network environment, like Koyeb.

To demonstrate the capabilities and power of Kong Konnect, Kong looked for a platform with the built-in primitives necessary to deploy Kong globally in less than 5 minutes and highlight Kong's capabilities.

Deployment Requirements

Quick multi-region deployments
High-performance underlying infrastructure
Low-latency
Global edge network
Private networking and service mesh
Support for Dockerfile deployment
Support for deployments from a sub-directory
Continuous deployments

Application Architecture

Kong deploys a distributed application compromised of multiple microservices written in Node.js and Go. All of the services are stored in a monorepo. The Kong API Gateway sits in front of the application, exposes REST endpoints, and enables a range of security features like rate limiting.

Kong Konnect Demo Application Architecture

Deploying Across 6 Locations in Less than 5 Minutes 🌐 ⏱️

With Koyeb, Kong could quickly deploy its microservices application worldwide in minutes. During a live stream event, Kong used Koyeb to showcase how to deploy a monolith from git sub-directories, created separate deployments for European services, tested the response time between services, and leveraged Terraform to automate deployments.

It’s great to have a platform like Koyeb where you simply point to your GitHub repository or Docker image, and after that, it will take care of deploying the application, so it can run worldwide.

— Viktor Gamov• Principal Developer Advocate at Kong

Leveraging Multi-Region Deployments and Koyeb’s Edge Network for Blazing-Fast Responses

Koyeb’s edge network of 255+ locations is responsible for terminating the TLS connection and handling caching. When a response cannot be returned from the edge network, the request is routed to the nearest core location running the requested service. Koyeb natively provides global networking from the edge to core locations.

To ensure low latency for users worldwide, Kong deployed the Kong Gateway that sits in front of the entire application across six of Koyeb's locations: San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Paris, Frankfurt, Singapore, and Tokyo. Additionally, Kong deployed various microservices of its application across Koyeb’s six locations.

The advantage of running on an edge network and leveraging multi-region deployments is effectively providing low latency for end users around the world. Here is a rundown of what end users in Seattle, New York, Barcelona, and Berlin will experience:

🇺🇸 / 🇨🇦 Users in New York are routed to the nearest edge location in New York and then their request is routed to Washington, D.C. while users in Vancouver reach the nearest edge location in Vancouver and then their request is routed to San Francisco.
🇪🇺 Users in Barcelona reach the nearest edge location in Barcelona and then their request is routed to the core location in Paris whereas users in Berlin reach the nearest edge location in Berlin and then their request is routed to the Frankfurt core location.

With this geo-distributed setup, end users’ requests are processed quickly because requests never have to travel far to reach a core location running the API Gateway and the requested service of the application.

Deploying a Monolith with Sub-Directories and Leveraging Dockerfiles during the Build Process

Kong leveraged the Koyeb platform’s ability to deploy services from sub-directories. Each component of the application has its own folder within the monorepo and each service has its own Dockerfile. Kong leveraged the Dockerfile build process to have Koyeb build their services into containers and deploy them worldwide.

Creating Separate Deployments for US and European Services

Kong's use case demonstrates how fast and simple it is to create segregated deployments for services that need to operate exclusively in Europe and for those running across the US. After selecting the Koyeb locations where each deployment of the application will run, Kong quickly deployed their segregated deployments.

Automating Deployments with Terraform

Kong used the Koyeb Terraform provider to replicate their deployment configurations and automate their deployments. With the Terraform provider, Kong successfully deployed a dedicated European region using the same global configuration. Where necessary, they changed the API Keys, TLS certificate, and Koyeb locations. Additionally, Terraform facilitates the injection of environment variables per region.

Koyeb Features Highlighted

Ready to Deploy Worldwide in Just Minutes? 🚀 🌎

Want to deploy your full stack apps, databases, APIs, and workers worldwide in minutes? Sign up and deploy your first service for free.

If you want for yourself how easy it is to deploy your own Kong Gateway on Koyeb, check out our dedicated tutorial on using Kong Gateway on Koyeb.