In Kong Gateway 2.0, we released Hybrid Mode, also known as Control Plane/Data Plane separation. With it, our customers could efficiently and securely

Faster Config Updates in Hybrid Mode with Incremental Config Sync

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2024-11-29 19:00:06

In Kong Gateway 2.0, we released Hybrid Mode, also known as Control Plane/Data Plane separation. With it, our customers could efficiently and securely deploy clusters of Kong Gateway Dataplanes on their on-prem, private, and public clouds in any combination they wanted, and they could control the entire cluster from a single point, the Control Plane.

Hybrid Mode became instantly popular with all our customers with large and varied deployments, due to the increased flexibility and ease of management. Over time those customers grew their configuration sets to sizes in the order of hundreds of thousands of configuration entries, which brought a new challenge to Hybrid Mode.

In Hybrid Mode, when the Admin API is used at the control plane level to change the active configuration, it immediately triggers a cluster-wide update of all data plane configurations. In these updates, the entire configuration set is sent to the data planes; a bigger configuration set means more data is sent down the wire, more time needed to travel through the network, and more time needed to process the new configuration set on each data plane. All this processing time could translate into latency spikes and loss in throughput for high-traffic dataplanes under certain conditions. Additionally, the processing of large configuration sets causes Kong Gateway Control Plane and Data Plane to consume extra memory proportional to configuration size.

To fix this problem, we worked on redesigning the way configuration updates are handled in Hybrid Mode: Incremental Configuration Sync.

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