Kong is meant for north-south communications, so it will be interesting to see what solutions they can come up with in the realms of east-west communications, service-to-service communications, and Zero Trust architecture. I believe that if they can provide for these areas, then they will be able to solve the overall integration and security concerns for microservices architecture in general.

There is a tool called Apigee. Apigee has a portal where you can inspect the APIs and do a live tracing of the API, features that are missing in Kong Enterprise and Azure API Management. I am unsure if something else needs to be considered for improvement. Kong Enterprise fails to provide live tracing of the APIs, which is possible nowadays. With live tracing of the APIs, you can see how the request is going and where it gets stuck, what the actual input was, what the response is, and all that information we can see with the help of live requests, which is impossible in Kong Enterprise. The aforementioned area can be considered for improvement in the solution. With Kong Enterprise, you can examine after the fact, but why it happens can't be examined.

I find that expressing information can be a bit challenging, especially for those who are new to installing email configs or using it for the first time. Understanding the configurations and knowing what needs to be done can be a bit difficult initially.

The solution should include policy features that are available in other solutions like MuleSoft API manager but missing in Kong Enterprise.

In comparison to Fortinet, Kong Enterprise fails to offer a huge number of ports in lower models of the solution. From an improvement perspective, the number of ports in lower models of the solution should be made available.

The GUI of the product is not very user-friendly, making it in areas where improvements are required. In Fortinet, the GUI allows users to deal directly with the configuration part.

The product's price is an area of concern where improvements are required.

The technical support team's response time needs to be improved. Kong Enterprise should improve its resiliency when it comes to the active DR setup.

The product could be improved by making the scaling up process easier. For example, it becomes difficult if you try to scale it up to multiple clusters.

We would like to see an automatic data API - when we have a database table or a store procedure - we want to be able to select it and the data API will be created automatically for GET and CRUD operations in OData format. This feature already exists in other solution and it is a game changer - reducing efforts, risks, and reliability.

Kong Enterprise has decided not to support the web portal feature anymore, but I think that feature should stay in the on-premises solution.

The tool needs improvement in UX.

If Kong provides a 30-day license like other API gateways, we can promote the solution to more customers because they are willing to use it. We are unable to showcase the security and functional features during the trial period, which is an issue for us. We are facing issues with the solution's features like reports and traffic analysis.

Kong Enterprise needs to improve its pricing, which starts at hundreds of thousands of dollars. Pricing should be based on API usage rather than monthly. It should improve its documentation as well. 

They need to improve the developer portal. There are currently no isolated data plans for federated teams that I can manage easily, and that's something they should look at. 

It can be our personal, our company's issue, but when we were doing separate projects, we were facing a lot of solutions. For some of our major projects, the API was not using Kong as a group platform. Sometimes they use Microsoft Azure or AWS. That's not a problem, but I think it's wasting some of our budget. We set Kong as an enterprise standard. There should be an easier way to integrate with other solutions, even though it's the same API solution layer. Comparability will be a good improvement. 

Kong Enterprise can improve the customization to be able to do the integration properly.

The price could be lower.

Mainly, I would say they need to improve the updates. The updates of the OS for Fortinet seem to require a lot of bandwidth. It would be good if they required fewer resources. Also, they might improve the frequency of the releases.

I say this because here in East Africa the Internet is not as reliable or as fast as in the UK — or other places outside Africa. The OS for the Fortinet is great — super, even — but the releases are bulky and cause some problems.

Even though I like the way that both the intrusion prevention and antivirus are incorporated in this one solution, I think they should improve how you switch between one feature and the other. It's not very user-friendly for someone who's not experienced with the product. It is also quite different from other firewalls, like Check Point. 

Kong has a huge community and lot of open source implementations and satisfied users. 

The motivation to move to Enterprise edition is still license and cost based. Kong can look at different options like managed and Hosted PaaS, different consumption tiers to make the transition practical and easier.