Mashape Unleashes Open Source Kong to Power the Next Generation of Applications Built on Microservices and APIs

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - Apr 28, 2015) - Today Mashape is giving the world's 25 million developers free access to Kong (http://getkong.org/), the industry's first open source platform for centrally managing microservices and APIs, and dispatching common logic across all of them. Built on the popular Nginx proxy server, Kong enables developers to create virtually anything on top of it with infinite expandability via initial plugins for authentication, logging, caching, rate limiting, transformation, security and other utilities.

Designed to streamline core processes developers use every day through a centralized dispatcher, Kong accelerates the creation of next-generation software, including applications powering Internet of Things, mobile and the Web. Kong is the core underlying technology at mashape.com, the global API hub that processes billions of API requests for more than 140,000 developers worldwide. With Kong, developers can focus their time and effort on creating inspiring new software without having to recode common backend logic for every microservice -- today's standard practice. Kong is frictionless, fully customizable and free to download for use instantaneously with no contracts.

"Engineering time is the most precious and costly asset of any company," said Augusto Marietti, co-founder and CEO of Mashape. "We're thrilled to open source Kong, which empowers developers making fast transitions from monolithic and legacy software to microservices-based architectures."

Developers are the driving force behind the digital business era, creating applications that increasingly power the world. APIs have become the connective tissue that allows apps and smart things to access data and exchange information, ushering in a new level of engagement and personalization that have redefined how companies do business. Microservices take it one step further, essentially breaking applications into single-function services for a more distributed and maintainable architecture.

"At CRV, we have observed that all modern applications are now based on microservices and we believe there is a massive opportunity for startups focused on this new DevOps toolchain for microservices-based applications," said Devdutt Yellurkar, general partner at Charles River Ventures. "After Signalfx, our first investment in the space, we are thrilled to be an investor in Mashape and welcome Kong, the first microservices management platform."

"Through APIs, microservices and containers are becoming ever more mainstream for developers," said Mike Volpi, partner at Index Ventures, an investor in Mashape. "Kong will now supercharge development teams by automating the most tedious and time-consuming processes, allowing organizations to use their developers' time more strategically."

"With Kong, we're giving developers a scalable open source platform that will save them time when building the APIs and microservices powering their applications, so they can focus on their actual product," said Marco Palladino, co-founder and CTO of Mashape. "Across industries, developers are increasingly uprooting the expensive, proprietary platforms they were once required to use in favor of offerings like Kong, which is designed to seamlessly integrate with other platforms and technologies, and is language-agnostic so it can work with any and all programming languages in use today and in the future."

"Mashape has been a great partner for us to reach a global community of developers," said Tim Hwang, director of strategic partnerships at Imgur. "Their commitment to continually providing fresh developer resources has supported our growth over the years and aligns with our own community-first ethos."

"Kong allows developers to reduce complexity and deployment times in implementing an API solution on the NGINX platform," said Owen Garrett, head of products at NGINX. "Best of all, the Kong modular architecture lets developers leverage a wide range of plug-ins such as NGINX Plus Monitoring, which provides fine-grained visibility into the health and performance of their API solution."

How to Use Kong to Replace Legacy and Proprietary Platforms
Kong is expandable and designed for microservices and APIs of all kinds -- public and private, cloud and on-premise. It offers superior performance, reliability and security, and can scale from a single data center in a small startup up to the multi hybrid environments of the enterprise.

Kong makes it fast, easy and efficient to:

• Manage multiple APIs and microservices with secure authentication and authorization, data encryption, logging, rate limiting and more
• Provide developers with documentation, usage analytics and insight into issues
• Use plugins in any flavor, and to support any use case
• Access from any network, client, server or application
• Scale horizontally to handle hundreds of billion of requests
• Support any API, inside or outside your infrastructure
  
  

Kong is a drop-in replacement for expensive proprietary API management systems, enabling developers to make an immediate transition to an open, flexible platform that is designed for easy interoperability. A simple RESTful API can be used to import data from third-party API management systems without downtime. Kong is available in several distributions, including CentOS, Debian, Docker and Ubuntu. It can be easily installed in the cloud through AWS, Rackspace and Linode, or on VM platforms such as Vagrant and VMware, and can be built from source on every other system.

Pricing and Availability
Open source Kong is available for download at no cost and with no strings attached. Download Kong today at: http://getkong.org. Optional enterprise support and commercial plugins are available upon request.

About Mashape
Mashape is transforming how software is created in the digital business era by streamlining the distribution and consumption of data and services through APIs. Mashape.com is the world's biggest API marketplace, processing billions of API requests for more than 140,000 developers worldwide and managing and distributing 10,000 APIs from startups like Imgur to enterprises such as Best Buy, and thousands of API consumers including Amazon, Citibank, Hyatt, Accenture, NASA, Target and DHL. Based in San Francisco, Mashape was founded in 2010 and is backed by Jeff Bezos, Eric Schmidt, CRV, NEA, Index Ventures, and Stanford University. To learn more, please visit www.mashape.com.

Open Source at Mashape
Open source is part of Mashape's DNA and mindset. Mashape has released many popular open source tools such as Unirest, the most-used HTTP Request library, Mockbin, Guardian.js and APIembed. (https://github.com/mashape)