Mashape Rebrands as Kong Inc., Declares Monolithic Application Dead

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - Oct 16, 2017) - The era of the monolithic application is over. Mainstream enterprises are leveraging microservices in a tectonic shift from legacy monolithic applications to completely decentralized models, with the microservices architecture market predicted to reach $33 billion by 2023. So that companies can realize the potential of microservices-based architectures as monolithic applications phase out, the microservices API company, Mashape, today rebranded as Kong Inc. and articulated its vision to become the broker layer that empowers developers to lead the software industrial revolution. In addition to this news, Kong also today announced the general availability of its new enterprise platform, Kong Enterprise Edition.

CEO Blog post Introducing Kong Inc.

While microservices increase developer productivity, and reduce time to market and refresh cycles for applications, they can also increase complexity and place additional burdens on engineering teams. Further, enterprises must ensure that all of their APIs are secure and perform at scale without putting unnecessary overhead on the network. Kong's Microservices API Gateway is an extendable abstraction layer that securely manages communication between APIs and microservices, future proofing an enterprise's architectural choices and facilitating the development of next-generation, decentralized applications at scale.

"In today's enterprise, APIs let you do everything from reserving warehouse spaces and sending snail mail via USPS to sending Slack messages. It's not just apps and services that are affected, it's the physical world. Nonstop data growth only increases the pervasiveness of and reliance on APIs," said Martin Casado, Kong investor and General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. "As software continues to eat the world, developers are the natural leaders of the microservices revolution, creating an insatiable demand for a platform like Kong, which lets them manage the explosion of APIs and easily reconfigure their infrastructure for the data-centric future."

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is Underway: the Software Industrial Revolution
Much like the efficiency and consistency of the assembly line fueled the Second Industrial Revolution, Kong powers the software industrial revolution, or Fourth Industrial Revolution. Kong allows engineering teams to manage, analyze, secure and consume microservices APIs with ease, confidence and reliability that prior methods of API management cannot provide. As enterprises push the boundaries of AI-based applications and embrace a cloud-based, decentralized approach to application deployment, Kong's API Gateway streamlines the transition from the old way to the new way. Kong enables developers to fully embrace the future of eCommerce, IoT, autonomous vehicles and software-based technological advancements that have not yet even been imagined.

"The software industrial revolution isn't happening in a vacuum, and it's far from plateauing. Just a few years ago, most companies still focused on developing heavyweight monolithic applications. Today, most applications are decoupled into smaller pieces built with APIs and open source tools. Emergent infrastructure tools like Kong, Docker and Kubernetes are making this transition from monolithics to microservices possible," said Augusto Marietti, CEO of Kong. "As we embrace a new frontier of technology, enterprises need an assembly line to manage and consume the APIs that power such nonstop innovation. We're looking ahead of the curve to become the de facto unified broker between the old and the new waves of services and data that power everything around us."

Mashape Rebrands to Kong Inc. in Recognition of Tight-knit Open Source Community
To demonstrate its commitment to helping enterprises move to a new paradigm of decentralized software deployments, Mashape has changed its name to Kong Inc. Previously, the company solely referred to its open source API Gateway and microservices abstraction layer as Kong. This evolution reflects how the close-knit Kong community -- hundreds of thousands of individual open source users and Mashape Enterprise customers -- already refer to the company, the technology and the community itself as "Kong." The new official name and brand identity underscore Kong's mission: to broker information through APIs.

More than four million downloads and thousands of IT teams around the world already rely on Kong's API Gateway to deliver better microservices APIs. As enterprises move away from legacy monolithic applications to decoupled applications and leverage microservices, and internal development teams continue to create APIs, Kong's API Gateway makes the security and orchestration of microservices APIs simple and scalable.

About Kong
Kong Inc., the microservices API company, enables the next generation applications for Global 5000 companies. The company's flagship product, Kong Enterprise Edition, is a modern microservices API abstraction platform built to handle the security, scale and traffic demands of large organizations as they transition to a microservice-based architecture. Kong investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, Charles River Ventures, Jeff Bezos, Stanford University and Eric Schmidt's Innovation Endeavors. For more information, visit konghq.com.