Kong Air

The Konnect Reference Platform is a technical guide for building an API delivery system and integrating with Kong Konnect. There are different ways to use the tools and materials provided. If you want to deploy the full platform you can follow the how-to guide which provides step-by-step instructions to set up an entire API delivery pipeline.

Alternatively, you can evaluate an example usage of the platform, pulling relevant technical solutions from it and applying them to your own use case as needed. The Kong Air project is one of these examples.

Kong Air is a fictional airline used to demonstrate how engineering organizations can use Konnect to build an API Management solution. The organization is made up of multiple teams responsible for a different parts of the airline’s software infrastructure and APIs. Teams own repositories that contain the code and configuration for their services, while the platform team is responsible for managing Konnect and other shared services.

Kong Air is a public GitHub organization owned by Kong. All the repositories in the organization are public, allowing you to view the various solutions to determine how it could be applied to your own use case. Specifically, the platform team repository contains GitHub Action workflows that enable APIOps delivery for the organization.

You can also evaluate the Konnect declarative configuration used by the Konnect Orchestrator to apply changes to the Konnect organization.

The organization is made up of a set of service application repositories that mimic airline company systems. The organization is also comprised of a set of fictional teams who own the repositories and are responsible for the development and delivery of the services.

Kong Air uses the Konnect Reference platform and the Konnect Orchestrator to manage the state of the Konnect Organization. The solution centers around the platform team repository which the orchestrator uses to stage API specifications for delivery to Konnect.

Currently there are the following application teams and service repositories:

• customer-data, which owns the bookings and customers services.
• flight-data which owns the flights and destinations services.

Each service repository holds an OpenAPI specification that describes the API contract for the service. For example, the flights service OpenAPI specification is found in the openapi.yaml file located in the root of the flights repository.

The orchestrator is configured to monitor this service application repositories and detect changes that are copied to the platform repository. Once the specifications are staged in the platform repository, the APIOps workflow process kicks in and guides the platform team in delivering changes to Konnect.

Feel free to explore the Kong Air organization repositories using what’s available to build your own API delivery system.

• See the FAQ page for more Q&A on the reference platform.
• Follow the How-To guide for step-by-step instructions on setting up the reference platform for your organization
• Check out the APIOps workflows page to learn about the API Delivery automations built into the reference platform