KONG: The API Management Layer

• Website: getkong.org
• Docs: getkong.org/docs
• Mailing List: Google Groups
• Gitter Chat: mashape/kong

Kong was built for securing, managing and extending APIs & Microservices. If you're building for web, mobile or IoT you will likely end up needing to implement common functionality on top of your actual software. Kong can help by acting as a gateway for any HTTP resource while providing logging, authentication and other functionality through plugins.

Core Features

• CLI: Control your Kong cluster from the command line just like Neo in the matrix.
• REST API: Kong can be operated with its RESTful API for maximum flexibility.
• Scalability: Distributed by nature, Kong scales horizontally simply by adding nodes.
• Performance: Kong handles load with ease by scaling and using nginx at the core.
• Plugins: Extendable architecture for adding functionality to Kong and APIs.
  • Logging: Log requests and responses to your system over TCP, UDP or to disk.
  • Monitoring: Live monitoring provides key load and performance server metrics
  • Authentication: Manage consumer credentials query string and header tokens.
  • Rate-limiting: Block and throttle requests based on IP or authentication.
  • Transformations: Add, remove or manipulate HTTP params and headers on-the-fly.
  • CORS: Enable cross origin requests to your APIs that would otherwise be blocked.
  • Anything: Need custom functionality? Extend Kong with your own Lua plugins!

Powered by NGINX and Cassandra with a focus on high performance and reliability, Kong runs in production at Mashape where it has handled billions of API requests for over ten thousand APIs.

Documentation

Full versioned documentation is available at GetKong.org:

• Installation
• Quick Start
• CLI Reference
• API Reference
• Configuration

Benchmarks

We set Kong up on AWS and load tested it to get some performance metrics. The Kong setup consisted of two m3.medium EC2 instances; one for Kong, the other running Cassandra.

Both servers had their limits increased:

Added fs.file-max=80000 to /etc/sysctl.conf

Added the following lines to: /etc/security/limits.conf

*          soft     nproc          80000
*          hard     nproc          80000
*          soft     nofile         80000
*          hard     nofile         80000

For these benchmarks a third server running an optimized "hello world" web server written in C was used as the target, while not exactly "real world usage" not having the target as a bottleneck we hope to get a more accurate assessment of Kong itself.

After adding the target_url into the Kong instance we load tested while ramping up from 1 to 2000 concurrent connections over 120 seconds. All together 117,185 requests with an average of 976 req/second or about 84,373,200 req/day went through Kong and back with only a single timeout.

Development

Please see the CONTRIBUTING.md if you would like to have your changes merged into Kong.

1. Clone the repository and make it your working directory.
2. Run [sudo] make install

This will build and install the kong luarock globally.

3. Run make dev

This will install development dependencies and create your environment configuration files:

• kong_TESTS.yml
• kong_DEVELOPMENT.yml

4. Run the tests:

make test-all

5. Run Kong with the development configuration file:

   $ kong start -c kong_DEVELOPMENT.yml

Makefile Operations

When developing, use the Makefile for doing the following operations:

Name	Description
install	Install the Kong luarock globally
dev	Setup your development environment
run	Run the DEVELOPMENT environment (kong_DEVELOPMENT.yml)
seed	Seed the DEVELOPMENT environment (kong_DEVELOPMENT.yml)
drop	Drop the DEVELOPMENT environment (kong_DEVELOPMENT.yml)
lint	Lint Lua files in kong/
coverage	Run unit tests + coverage report (only unit-tested modules)
test	Run the unit tests
test-all	Run all unit + integration tests at once

License

Kong is provided under the MIT License.