Table of Contents
- Executive Summary
- Field Test Overview
- Field Test Results
- Conclusion
- Appendix
- About Kong
- About Eric Phenix
- About GigaOm
- Copyright
1. Executive Summary
This report was commissioned by Kong. Testing was conducted independently by GigaOm’s team of analysts.
APIs define the way modern-day business is conducted. Every value-producing interaction with a business can be traced back to an API call. APIs are pivotal in driving customer growth, defining user experience, and facilitating the interaction between customers and the business. High-performance APIs are also crucial to implementing machine learning and AI. As we continue to modernize and break apart legacy monolithic applications, the number of connections between applications and the requirements we place upon our API connective layer increase exponentially.
It is now imperative for businesses to adopt a centralized API governance policy backed by a performant and cost-efficient gateway to manage the communication between applications. This centralization reduces overall complexity by providing a single pane of glass for building, integrating, monitoring, and scaling a business application suite. While some cloud-based APIs can scale to high levels of throughput, none are truly platform-agnostic, and are capable of running wherever your workloads reside. Unless your business commits entirely to a single technology platform, it may need double or triple the technical know-how to build and operate proprietary APIs on each platform.
Kong Enterprise is a platform-agnostic, infinitely scalable API integration solution designed to meet the most demanding environments. Unlike competing API solutions that employ complex, legacy architectures, unpredictable cost models, and less performant technologies, Kong Enterprise and Kong Konnect add convenience and functionality, positioning Kong Enterprise front and center in the API governance space.
Impact
Choosing the right API gateway is a first-tier architectural decision for any business, directly influencing cost, operational overhead, application performance, application uptime, and user experience. Key considerations when adopting an API gateway platform include:
- A centralized management interface with platform-agnostic deployment reduces operational costs and simplifies the business’s technology stack. Rather than maintain a separate set of API technologies for each platform, a single platform-agnostic gateway can fulfill the same role, saving organizations engineering time, support costs, and knowledge base.
- API gateways are essential for maintaining application uptime. Through rate-limiting and other decoupling configurations, API gateways ensure that business critical applications aren’t overwhelmed to the point of failure. They enable businesses to achieve modern, decoupled architectures and increase application uptime.
- An extensible API Gateway with native plugin support offers an advantage over gateways that rely on external flow hooks that may impose a higher performance impact.
Performance Testing
Enterprise environments often demand responsive, low-latency API interaction. To understand how Kong Enterprise and competing solutions behave under these conditions, we tested Kong and four competing gateway solutions. Each gateway was deployed on a dedicated 16-core EC2 instance and then ran the same K6 load test against each. The result: Kong’s scalable back end delivered significantly better performance than the next-leading competitor. We will dive deeper into the test setup and configuration in the Field Test Overview section of this report.
Figure 1: API Performance Overview
About GigaOm Benchmarks
GigaOm Benchmarks consist of hands-on field tests and lab-based performance testing shaped to reflect real-world scenarios and assess claims made by vendors. Our Benchmark reports inform technology buyers with transparent, repeatable tests and results, backed by GigaOm’s expert analysis. Where quantitative metrics may not fully describe an experience, qualitative metrics and analyst commentary may be used to provide context and product positioning in the market.
While no testing can make up for real-world implementations, we design benchmark test suites to validate a select set of hypotheses which are designed to demonstrate the potential business value and product differentiation against competitors.