Application programming interface development manager Kong Inc., formerly called Mashape Inc., today is announcing the availability of its Kong Enterprise Edition microservices API abstraction platform for enterprise development.

The company, which recently merged its marketplace with that of API distributor Rapid Software Solutions Ltd.  to create what it claims is the world’s largest resource of its kind, said its new management platform helps organizations expose services and legacy applications as APIs while scaling and securing the interfaces as applications are rebuilt based on a microservices-based architecture.

Kong, which has raised $26 million from prominent investors that include Andreessen Horowitz LLC, Charles River Ventures LLC and Amazon.com Inc. Chief Executive Jeff Bezos, is one of a brace of new companies that are attempting to cash in on the raging popularity of APIs.

As organizations move to applications built of loosely coupled microservices running in software containers that can extend applications across different computing environments, APIs have emerged as their favored way to expose data and services. For example, the ability for an airline reservation service to insert a book flight automatically into a Google calendar is enabled by APIs. Researcher Ovum Ltd. estimates that the API economy will total $2.2 trillion by next year.

Microservices-based applications suffer from complexity, however, particularly as they grow. That’s why a number of companies are competing to offer management and orchestration services. Google Inc. fanned the flames last year when it acquired API management vendor Apigee Inc. for $625 million. Startups such as Jitterbit Inc. and SnapLogic Inc. are also competing for a piece of the action.

Kong Enterprise Edition provides development teams with a scalable API gateway that works on private, public and hybrid cloud architectures. It uses a lightweight, extensible abstraction layer that securely manages communication between microservices APIs. Developers can visualize traffic in real time and view performance and error requests made by APIs for testing and troubleshooting.

Management is done from a graphical user interface-driven dashboard with an extensive set of customizations for administrative tasks. A related developer portal serves up developer management features for documentation, customization and native support for the most popular spec formats, including the Swagger framework. Scalability features include rate limiting, edge caching, the ability to combine regular expression variables and dynamic transformations for routing, and Redis Sentinel high-availability support.

Security is provided through role-based access control, self-service resource provisioning with access control over individual microservices and nodes and support for authentication platforms such as OpenID Connect and Lightweight Directory Access Protocol.

Pricing is custom-quoted based upon number of seats and typically runs to six figures annually, a spokeswoman said.

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