Marco Palladino, CTO of Kong Inc. sits down with John Walls for a digital CUBE Conversation. #theCUBE #CUBEConversation https://siliconangle.com/2021/03/17/kong-powers-hybrid-and-multicloud-connectivity-through-secure-reliable-api-management-cubeconversations-cubeoncloudawsstartups/ Kong powers hybrid and multicloud connectivity through secure, reliable API management BY MARK ALBERTSON If a business experienced revenue growth of 100%, it might be cause for celebration. And 200% would call for champagne. Kong Inc. has reported 618% revenue growth over a two-year period, earning it a spot in the top 30 of California’s fastest-growing private companies. The firm’s rapid growth has been fueled by enterprise interest in microservices and API connectivity. Kong’s software connects APIs and microservices natively across and within clouds, containers and datacenter environments. The key breakthrough for Kong has been to develop a solution that not only connected APIs and microservices, but also provided continuous uptime in a highly decoupled and distributed enterprise computing world. In anticipation of the AWS Startup Showcase: Innovations With Cloud Data — set to kick off on March 24 — theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s livestreaming studio, spoke with Marco Palladino (pictured), co-founder and chief technology officer of Kong Inc., who appeared with theCUBE’s John Walls in an exclusive interview. (* Disclosure below.) “With microservices, we’re making ourselves comfortable with always running in a partially degraded system,” Palladino explained. “There are so many moving parts running at the same time, they cannot possibly be all up and running. Our infrastructure is built in such a way that even when that happens, the customers and the users will never experience any downtime.” Moving on from monolithic apps Kong’s approach diverges from a previous architecture built around monolithic applications. By breaking these applications into smaller microservices, businesses can speed up the process of innovation and service delivery. “Monolithic applications as they grow become huge, hard to move, hard to scale, hard to deploy, hard to innovate,” Palladino said. “As an industry, we have learned that if we can decouple those large monolithic applications into smaller components like microservices, we can then ship and innovate faster.” Kong’s service connectivity platform is built on an open-source core. In October, the company unveiled Kong Konnect, a full-stack platform for cloud native apps delivered as a service. Kong Konnect integrates the company’s API Gateway, Ingress Controller and Kong Mesh, which was built on top of the open-source Kuma mesh. “It’s a self-service transformation,” Palladino said. “The open-source ecosystem provides us with a landscape of tools, platforms and technologies that application and infrastructure teams can use in order to figure out the best formula for them to achieve success.” In moving beyond the limitations of the monolithic application, Kong’s solution is designed to enhance security as well. “With microservices, we can set up tighter security rules in place to determine what services can consume other services and in what capacity,” Palladino said. “Microservices give us the opportunity to implement a new-generation security model for all of our applications. Securing them is one of the opportunities we cannot miss.” Kong has continued to roll out enhancements for its platform. In early March, the company announced an update for Kong Mesh, which enabled DevOps teams to manage compliance as code and included authentication mechanisms between global and remote-control planes in multiple zones. “Today, when we want to enter a new market, we just leverage a cloud vendor; we don’t go and build a physical datacenter from scratch,” Palladino noted. “Likewise, when we build modern applications, we don’t want to build the orchestration platforms by ourselves. Everything else that’s not part of the core business should be delegated as part of the underlying infrastructure.”