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
   

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2. “What do you mean production
   is down? It was only a config
   change”
   

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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
   

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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
   

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5. 1
   Configuration management and drift
   detection for Kong
   Introducing decK
   

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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
   

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8. 2 Configuring
   Kong Gateway
   

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9. 3 Creating backups
   with decK
   

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10. 4 Applying changes
    declaratively
    

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11. 5 Using decK with CI/CD
    

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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
    

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13. 6 Reviewing changes
    

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14. 7 Distributed Configuration
    

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15. 8 From zero to running
    

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16. One More Thing
    decK also works
    with Kong Konnect
    

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17. Thank you!
    Michael Heap
    michael.heap@konghq.com
    

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