Konnect Orchestrator

The Konnect Orchestrator is a software tool provided as part of the Konnect Reference Platform. The tool is a Go based project and released as a binary named koctl. We will refer to the tool by the koctl name in this document.

koctl is a multi-purpose CLI tool you can use to setup a git repository to support an API management platform, configure the repository to support your development teams, and apply declarative configurations to your Kong Konnect organizations.

• Teams, Roles, and Users including invitations and user -> team mappings
• IdP configuration including Konnect Built-in, OIDC, SAML, and IdP Group to Konnect Team mappings
• Control Planes and Control Plane RBAC policies for managed Teams
• Developer Portals and APIs including API specifications and API Implementations
• Analytics Custom Reports
• Notification Hub configurations

The koctl tool is specifically designed to enable and apply the concepts for the Konnect Reference Platform. Specifically, the following functions are provided to support the reference platform features:

• Initialize a central platform team git repository that supports the API management platform
• Configure the platform repository with new organizations and environments
• Run an API server and web based UI application to enable self-service onboarding for developer teams and their service applications
• Stage service application API specifications to the platform repository preparing them to be delivered to Konnect
• Apply declarative configuration within the platform repository CICD pipeline to Konnect organizations

MacOS users can install the orchestrator using Homebrew:

brew install kong/konnect-orchestrator/koctl

On Linux or Windows, install the orchestrator directly from the releases page on GitHub:

Releases - Kong/konnect-orchestrator

For the complete instructions for running the orchestrator as part of building an API management platform, see the step-by-step how-To guide.

koctl is an open source project and the code can be found in the public GitHub repository:

https://github.com/Kong/konnect-orchestrator

Environments may be any conceptual grouping of resources that you want. Typical examples include “dev” or “prod” engineering stages, but you could also form environments around business units or products.

Konnect does not natively support the concept of environments. The orchestrator manages environments synthetically by prefixing resource names, applying labels, and setting different access control policies based on well known environment types. The orchestrator currently supports 2 environment types, DEV and PROD. Various resource configuration decisions are encoded into the Environment type, for example RBAC and portal settings. Environments also require a region configuration which must map to a Konnect supported geographic region.

Additional questions may be answered in the FAQ page. If your question is not answered there, please feel free to reach out on the Kong Nation discussion forums.