Controlling Your Kong Gateway With decK and CI/CD

We used to configure services by hand, then came tools such as Puppet, Chef and Ansible. Then we used to build infrastructure by hand, and we got tools like Terraform and Pulumi. So why are we still configuring routes and plugins in Kong manually?

This session will introduce you to Kong’s declarative configuration capabilities and how to use your CI system to lint and apply these configurations in a variety of environments. Test your changes in a staging environment, then apply exactly the same config to production with a click of a button.

Transcript

1. Michael Heap Director of Developer Relations, Kong Controlling your Kong Gateway with decK and CI/CD
2. “What do you mean production is down? It was only a config change”
3. • Developer Relations at Kong • Wrote a book on configuration change management with Ansible • Has still broken production with a configuration change I’m Michael
4. Today’s Plan 1. Introduce decK 2. Configure a new Kong Gateway instance 3. Back up our Gateway config using decK 4. Change our plugin configuration and apply the change with decK 5. Build a CI/CD flow to automatically apply those changes Basics 6. Manual review using environments and deck-diff 7. Distributed configuration (teams manage their own 🥳) 8. From zero to running gateway using declarative configuration Advanced Usage
5. 1 Configuration management and drift detection for Kong Introducing decK
6. Features decK Export Backup an existing Gateway to a declarative configuration file Import Populate Kong’s database from a configuration file Diff Visualise the difference between your configuration and the current Gateway state Validate Ensure that your configuration file is valid and will apply cleanly to your Gateway Distributed Config Merge service definitions from multiple sources to build a single source of truth Automate decK is designed to be run as part of your CI system
8. 2 Configuring Kong Gateway
9. 3 Creating backups with decK
10. 4 Applying changes declaratively
11. 5 Using decK with CI/CD
12. Today’s Plan 1. Introduce decK ✅ 2. Configure a new Kong Gateway instance ✅ 3. Back up our Gateway config using decK ✅ 4. Change our plugin configuration and apply the change with decK ✅ 5. Build a CI/CD flow to automatically apply those changes ✅ Basics 6. Manual review using environments and deck-diff 7. Distributed configuration (teams manage their own 🥳) 8. From zero to running gateway using declarative configuration Advanced Usage
13. 6 Reviewing changes
14. 7 Distributed Configuration
15. 8 From zero to running
16. One More Thing decK also works with Kong Konnect
17. Thank you! Michael Heap michael.heap@konghq.com