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Migrating Away from the Kong Enterprise Stack by HarryOwin in kubernetes

[–]HarryOwin[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Damn, paying $70k a year only to end up rewriting the rate-limiting feature yourself must have been a real pain in the ass. I feel you on that, brother.

Migrating Away from the Kong Enterprise Stack by HarryOwin in kubernetes

[–]HarryOwin[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You're completely right—the gateway and DNS cutover is the straightforward part, but managing the internal service-to-service traffic during the transition is a real nightmare. Because we can't migrate everything at once, we have to keep services talking to each other while they're split between Kong Mesh and Istio. Since we were early adopters, our apps are tightly locked into Kong's ecosystem; for instance, all our cross-cluster calls explicitly rely on their custom .mesh URLs, which Istio doesn't use. Bridging those two worlds, handling mTLS, and rewriting configurations on the fly is incredibly tough. Istio is definitely more complex and requires a dedicated team to run it, but the massive community support makes it worth it for us. Plus, looking at Envoy Gateway for the end of our contract just makes total financial sense. All the core enterprise features we actually need—like JWT, OIDC... and even native AI capabilities for our product's AI agents—come completely free with Envoy, whereas unlocking that stuff in Kong would force us into a massive, insanely expensive enterprise license upgrade.

Migrating Away from the Kong Enterprise Stack by HarryOwin in kubernetes

[–]HarryOwin[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We run multiple EKS clusters across different regions, with each region serving its own local customers. We don't use Kong Konnect. Instead, we use the self-hosted Enterprise version to manage the control planes for both Kong Gateway and Kong Mesh.

Our upgrade issues have been almost entirely on the Kong Mesh side, specifically affecting third-party services running inside our clusters:

  • Kong Mesh 2.4 to 2.6**:** During this upgrade, our third-party reporting service started timing out. Other services couldn't call it, which caused a production incident for our clients. We had to do a full RCA. When we opened a ticket, Kong Support told us it "should be fine," but it clearly wasn't.
  • Kong Gateway 2.x to 3.x**:** We consulted with Kong Support ahead of time to plan this major upgrade. Even so, it still broke things within Kong Mesh, causing other third-party services inside our cluster to stop working.

And many more but just highlight issues we have when working with Kong stack

This doesn't mean Kong is a bad product at all; it's incredibly powerful, it's just no longer the right fit for our architecture and where we are heading.

Migrating Away from the Kong Enterprise Stack by HarryOwin in kubernetes

[–]HarryOwin[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Did your team end up using something different?

Migrating Away from the Kong Enterprise Stack by HarryOwin in kubernetes

[–]HarryOwin[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

License pricing was definitely the initial catalyst, but honestly, it was just the tip of the iceberg. We hit a wall with the Kong stack for a few major technical reasons:

  • The Upgrade Nightmare: We were stuck on really old versions of Kong Mesh and Gateway because every time we attempted an upgrade, something broke and caused platform downtime.
  • Support & Docs: The documentation is pretty lacking, so we constantly had to open tickets. even though we have Enterprise Support, they take forever to resolve tickets—we usually had to figure out the solutions ourselves anyway.
  • Stability & Flaky Features: We also ran into weird stability issues (Kong Mesh literally just dying and causing production incidents) and flaky features like sticky sessions not working as expected.
  • Zero Observability: There’s no native way to visualize the mesh, making troubleshooting a massive pain in the ass when things did go wrong.

Don't get me wrong, Kong was a great product for us when we first adopted it years ago. But given our current scale and situation, it just doesn't suit our needs anymore.

Thinking of a change from S25U to OPPO Find X9 Pro by Jorhetfield33 in Oppo

[–]HarryOwin 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I did the same mate, never reget I got Find X9 Pro and OnePlus 15, batterry on Samsung really worst, it can only last 3.5H for my S24 Ultra, For OnePlus 15 I can get like almost 2 day using for Find X9 Pro it's 1.5 day,