Kong Introduces ‘ZeroLB’

The company also announced the general availability of Kong Mesh 1.4, with industry-first  features to support ZeroLB out of the box, offering up to 4x improvement in network performance and a substantial cost reduction compared to traditional centralized LB-based architectures. Based on customer feedback, this modern approach for load balancing is expected to save organizations with mission-critical applications up to a million dollars a year by reducing required technology investments.

ZeroLB is a modern, decentralized load balancing pattern that aims to remove every load balancer that is being deployed in front of individual services and applications. In this capacity, ZeroLB eliminates the need for elastic cloud load balancers, software load balancers and hardware load balancers from the equation. ZeroLB reduces costs, improves network performance by removing extra hops in the network, removes complexity in applications and also gives access to more advanced self-healing capabilities, while simultaneously maximizing portability across every environment and every cloud. To read more about this new pattern, please see “ZeroLB: a new decentralized pattern for load balancing.”

One Kong customer is a global travel company that processes an average of 2 billion pricing requests per day. The company partnered with Kong to scale load balancing traffic in a horizontal and seamless manner across its legacy data centers and the cloud. This company says it expects to see seven figures in cost reductions per year by replacing legacy, centralized load balancers with modern ZeroLB load balancing powered by Kong Mesh, while improving performance by 2x and enabling a more pragmatic transformation to the cloud.

“Traditional load balancers were built for the monolithic era and don’t work well with today’s cloud native applications because they are slow and create points of failure that cause businesses to lose customers and sales,” said Marco Palladino, CTO and co-founder of Kong Inc. “I’m thrilled to be spearheading this effort at Kong to evangelize the ZeroLB movement, where legacy load balancing as we know it within the network is dead. Kong is introducing a new way of building load balancers for today’s modern era of software architectures by decentralizing it.”