Kong 1.2.0rc1 available for testing!

Announcements
1

Hello Kong people!

It’s time to start a new release cycle, and we are happy to announce the first release candidate, Kong 1.2.0rc1!

This release brings improvements to reduce P95 latency and declarative configuration support. It also comes with a newly open sourced plugin, previously only available to Enterprise customers, among other new features.

Download

:package: Download Kong 1.2.0rc1 today — as always we are looking forward for your feedback!

  • :warning: All Bintray repositories have been renamed from kong-community-edition-* to kong-* .
  • :warning: All Kong packages have been renamed from kong-community-edition to kong .

For more details about the updated installation, please visit the official docs: https://konghq.com/install.

What’s new in Kong 1.2.0rc1 :fireworks:

  • :rocket: Core
    • Asynchronous router updates: introduce a configuration properties router_consistency , with two possible values: strict and eventual . If set to eventual, whenever your Kong configuration changes, router update operations are performed out of the proxy path, asynchronously, reducing P95 latency when performing runtime Services/Routes manipulation.
    • Cache warmup of Kong entities at initialization. A new configuration directive db_cache_warmup_entities was introduced, allowing users to specify which entities should be preloaded. Cache warmup allows for ahead of time DNS resolution for Services with a hostname. This feature reduces first requests latency, improving P99 latency.
    • Wildcard SNI matching: the ssl_certificate_by_lua phase (and stream preread) is now able to match an SNI against any registered wildcard SNI.
    • HTTPS routes can now be matched by SNI : the snis route attribute can now be set for HTTPS routes and is used as a routing attribute
    • New optional configuration properties for PostgreSQL concurrency control: pg_max_concurrent_queries sets the maximum number of concurrent queries to the database; pg_semaphore_timeout allows you to tune the timeout for acquiring access to the database connection. The default behavior remains the same, with no concurrency limitation.
  • :page_facing_up: Declarative configuration
    • Hash checking for declarative configuration, avoiding reloading if the configuration has not changed. The /config endpoint now accepts a check_hash query argument; hash checking only happens if its value is set to 1.
    • The loading of declarative configuration is now done atomically, and with a safety check to verify that the new configuration fits in memory.
  • :gear: Admin API
    • Entity schema validation endpoints: you can use the new endpoint /schemas/:entity_name/validate to validate an instance of any entity type in Kong without creating the entity
    • Memory statistics in the /status endpoint. The response now includes a memory field, which contains lua_shared_dicts and workers_lua_vms , with stats on shared dictionaries and workers Lua VM memory usage.
  • :electric_plug: Plugins
    • proxy-cache: we open sourced the HTTP proxy cache plugin, previously an Enterprise-only feature
    • New data available for logging plugins: log request TLS version, cipher, and verification status.
  • :construction_worker_man: PDK
    • New function kong.node.get_memory_stats
    • Inheriting from BasePlugin is now optional

Plus of course the usual amount of bugfixes and internal improvements!

Upgrade Path :arrow_up:

You can upgrade from 0.14.1 or any release in the 1.x series (Note: upgrading from a pre-0.14 cluster is not supported). You can use a Blue/Green deployment method to update: “Blue” means your current version (for example, 0.14.1, 1.0.x or 1.1.x), “Green” means the new version 1.2.0rc1:

  1. Download 1.2.0rc1, and configure it to point to the same datastore as your Blue cluster (running 0.14, 1.0 or 1.1). Run kong migrations up.
  2. Both Blue and Green nodes can now run simultaneously on the same datastore. Start provisioning 1.2.0rc1 nodes, but do not use their Admin API yet. Prefer making Admin API requests to your Blue cluster instead.
  3. Gradually divert traffic away from your Blue nodes, and into your 1.2.0rc1 cluster. Monitor your traffic to make sure everything is going smoothly.
  4. When your traffic is fully migrated to the Green 1.2.0rc1 cluster, decommission your Blue nodes.
  5. From your 1.2.0rc1 cluster, run: kong migrations finish. From this point on, it will not be possible to start Blue nodes pointing to the same datastore anymore. Only run this command when you are confident that your migration was successful. From now on, you can safely make Admin API requests to your 1.2.0rc1 nodes.

Install 1.2.0rc1 on a fresh datastore :arrow_down:

Since version 1.0, Kong uses a new, improved migrations framework. The following commands can be run to prepare a new 1.2 cluster from a fresh datastore:

$ kong migrations bootstrap [-c kong.conf]
$ kong start [-c kong.conf]

What’s next :rocket:

Depeding on the community feedback, we are going to either tag and release 1.2.0 final or make a new release candidate 1.2.0rc2.

As always, consider yourself encouraged to reach out to us here or via GitHub issues if you have any questions or feedback about this release! Your feedback is essential to make Kong better!

3 Likes
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Hope to test this heavily sometime this short work week! Impressive release, great work Kong team.

1 Like
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Hi,

Nice to see so fast evolution.
How about https://github.com/Kong/kong/milestone/27 1.1.3 release. It will be included on 1.2.0?

thanks

1 Like
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@jeremyjpj0916 yay, looking forward to your feedback!!

@flowdopip Yes, everything in the 1.1.3 milestone is included in 1.2.0; they were not called out here because they are bugfixes rather than new features. We always keep two milestones open: we keep track of fixes sent to master in “x.y.(z+1)” and features sent to next in “x.(y+1).0”. At the time we prepare a new .0 release, all pending fixes committed in master are merged into next.

2 Likes