Kong 1.4.0rc1 available for testing!

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Hello Kong Nation!

It’s time to start a new release cycle, and we are happy to announce the availability of the first release candidate, Kong 1.4.0rc1 that has just gone out and is ready for testing!

Kong 1.4.0rc1 adds the new status interface, the transformations DAO property, and the ability to change the hostname used to connect to proxied servers.

The highlight of this release are:

  • :fireworks: New configuration option cassandra_refresh_frequency to set the frequency that Kong will check for Cassandra cluster topology changes, avoiding restarts when Cassandra nodes are added or removed.
  • :fireworks: New transformations property in DAO schemas, which allows adding functions that run when database rows are inserted or updated. #5047
  • :fireworks: The new attribute hostname has been added to upstreams entities. This attribute is used as the Host header when proxying requests through Kong to servers that are listening on server names that are different from the names to which they resolve. #4959
  • :fireworks: The new status interface has been introduced. It exposes insensitive health, metrics and error read-only information from Kong, which can be consumed by other services in the infrastructure to monitor Kong’s health. This removes the requirement of the long-used workaround to monitor Kong’s health by injecting a custom server block. #4977
  • :fireworks: New configuration option router_update_frequency that allows setting the frequency that router and plugins will be checked for changes. This new option avoids performance degradation when Kong routes or plugins are frequently changed. #4897
  • New Admin API response header X-Kong-Admin-Latency, reporting the time taken by Kong to process an Admin API request. #4966
  • In addition to consumer, credential, and IP levels, now rate-limiting plugin has service-level support. #5031
  • Now rate-limiting local policy counters expire using the shared dictionary’s TTL, avoiding to keep unnecessary counters in memory. #5029
  • Authentication plugins have support for tags now. #4945
  • The response-transformer plugin now supports renaming response headers. #5040

:package: The distribution packages are available for download in our usual community repositories!

:arrow_up: The recommended upgrade path is the usual one for major version bumps. They are detailed in Upgrade Path to 1.4.0rc1.

:books: We are still working on bringing our documentation up-to-date, and are asking of you that if you want to test 1.4.0rc1, please refer to the links (Pull Requests or new plugins repositories) which all include some documentation around the new features, thank you. :slight_smile:

:warning: As a release candidate, we discourage the use of 1.4.0rc1 in production environments, but we strongly encourage testers to give it a try and give us your feedback! This forum is a great way to ask questions or post feedback, and the GitHub issues are still the de-facto place for bug reports.

:heart: We thank in advance all of the testers for this release candidate and looking forward to hearing back from you!

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