Serverless Gateways

Note: Serverless Gateways are currently only supported in Konnect Plus. If you are an enterprise tier customer and are interested in Serverless Gateways, please contact your account team.

Serverless gateways are lightweight data plane nodes that are fully managed by Kong in Konnect.

Serverless gateways offer the following benefits:

Konnect manages provisioning and placement.
Can be deployed in under 30 seconds.
Access to Kong Gateway plugins.

You can manage your serverless gateway nodes within Gateway Manager.

How do Serverless gateways work?

 
flowchart TD
A(Dev Portal • Gateway Manager • Analytics • Service Catalog)
B( Kong-managed control plane \n #40;Kong Gateway instance#41;)
C( Data plane 1\n #40;Kong Gateway instance#41;)
D( Data plane 2\n #40;Kong Gateway instance#41;)

subgraph id1 [Konnect]
A --- B
end

B --Kong proxy 
configuration---> id2

subgraph id2 [Fully-managed cloud nodes]
C
D
end

style id1 stroke-dasharray:3,rx:10,ry:10
style id2 stroke-dasharray:3,rx:10,ry:10
style B stroke:none,fill:#0E44A2,color:#fff

Figure 2: Data planes are hosted in the cloud by Kong. The control plane connects to the database, and the data planes receive a configuration from the control plane.

When you create a Serverless gateway, Konnect creates a control plane. This control plane, like other Konnect control planes, is hosted by Konnect. Konnect then provisions a hosted data plane for you and automatically configures the connection to the control plane, before providing the user with an auto-generated, unique hostname in the form of https://kong-xxxxxx.kongcloud.dev.

Serverless gateways are designed to be fast to provision and lightweight, therefore it is not possible to configure:

Kong Gateway version. The default is latest and is automatically upgraded.
The number of data planes.
The size of the data planes.
The region that the data planes are deployed to. Typically the data planes are deployed on the same region as the Konnect control plane, but with serverless gateways this is not guaranteed.

Note: Control planes in Konnect cannot contain both serverless gateway and self-managed data plane nodes.

Networking

Serverless gateways only supports public networking. There are currently no capabilities for private networking between your data centers and hosted Kong data planes. For use cases where private networking is required, Dedicated Cloud Gateways with AWS Transit Gateways may be a better choice.

Plugin considerations for serverless gateways

There are some limitations for plugins with serverless gateways:

Any plugins that depend on a local agent will not work with serverless gateways.
Any plugins that depend on the Status API or on Admin API endpoints will not work.
Any plugins or functionality that depend on AWS IAM AssumeRole need to be configured differently. This includes data plane resilience.

Serverless Gateways

How do Serverless gateways work?

Networking

Plugin considerations for serverless gateways

More information