Kong Inc. is a software company that provides open-source platforms and cloud services for managing, monitoring, and scaling application programming interfaces (APIs) and

microservices A microservice architecture – a variant of the service-oriented architecture structural style – is an architectural pattern that arranges an application as a collection of loosely-coupled, fine-grained services, communicating through lightwe ...

. Some of the products offered by Kong Inc. include: Kong Gateway, an open-source API gateway; Kong Enterprise, an API platform that is built on top of Kong Gateway; Kong Konnect, a service connectivity platform; Kuma, an open-source service mesh; Kong Mesh, an enterprise-grade service mesh that is built on top of Kuma; and Insomnia, an open-source API design and testing tool.

History

The original product was first developed in 2009 in

Milan Milan ( , , Lombard: ; it, Milano ) is a city in northern Italy, capital of Lombardy, and the second-most populous city proper in Italy after Rome. The city proper has a population of about 1.4 million, while its metropolitan city h ...

, Italy and first incorporated in the US as Mashape, Inc. The original project was a mash-up (web application hybrid) platform used to aggregate different functions and UI elements from third-party products and services. While developing the product the team dealt with a number of APIs, which inspired the founders to create a unified hub to organize the growing market of APIs. In November 2010 Mashape appeared online as an Alpha product and launched in private Beta in June 2011. The team raised the first funds in the US. In 2010, Mashape received its first angel funding and a further $1,500,000 in seed funding. Mashape then rejected some acquisition offers in 2011. In 2015 Mashape launched an open source project called Kong, which later helped the company secure an $18 million in Series B funding. Subsequently, with the intention of pivoting the company's focus to its new Kong business, Mashape sold API Marketplace to RapidAPI, and rebranded the company to Kong Inc. In 2019, Kong acquired Insomnia, an open-source API testing platform.

Technology

In 2015, Mashape released Kong, an open-source management layer for

API An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how ...

s and

Microservices A microservice architecture – a variant of the service-oriented architecture structural style – is an architectural pattern that arranges an application as a collection of loosely-coupled, fine-grained services, communicating through lightwe ...

that is built on top of

Nginx Nginx (pronounced "engine x" ) is a web server that can also be used as a reverse proxy, load balancer, mail proxy and HTTP cache. The software was created by Igor Sysoev and publicly released in 2004. Nginx is free and open-source software ...

and

Cassandra Cassandra or Kassandra (; Ancient Greek: Κασσάνδρα, , also , and sometimes referred to as Alexandra) in Greek mythology was a Trojan priestess dedicated to the god Apollo and fated by him to utter true prophecies but never to be belie ...

/PostgreSQL with the claim of improving performance and reliability. Kong is the main engine of Mashape's marketplace.TechCrunch - Mashape Open-Sources Its Kong API Management Platform
/ref>

References

{{Reflist Application programming interfaces Cloud platforms Computing websites Internet properties established in 2009 Online companies of the United States Companies based in San Francisco 2009 establishments in California