Cloud connectivity specialist Kong has announced a range of new platforms and updates for cloud and software development.

The company updated its enterprise-grade mesh platform to version 1.4 - which brings new capabilities for portable and decentralised load balancing across the cloud, as well as local development machines designed to improve accuracy and replicability.

Kong Mesh 1.4 now offers several new features, such as five decentralised load balancing algorithms: least request, maglev, random, ring hash, and round robin.

Furthermore, there is now comprehensive support for Kubernetes (through automatically injected sidecars) and virtual machines (through manually injected sidecars across every cloud. Envoy native support that extends connectivity logic for Kong Mesh using any WebAssembly-supported language.

L4 + L7 load balancing can also address every service type such as HTTP and gRPC services, while automatic-self healing capabilities feature circuit breakers, cross-zone connectivity, and zone-aware load balancing.

Load balancing is a major focus for Kong, which has also introduced a new concept called ZeroLB,  a new pattern for load balancing.

ZeroLB is described as a load balancing pattern that aims to remove every load balancer that is being deployed in front of individual services and applications

The company explains in further detail, “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.

Kong CTO and cofounder Marco Palladino explains that traditional load balancers don't tend to work well with the cloud because they are slow and create failure points that have business consequences, such as lost sales.

“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 decentralising it.

Kong investor and Andreessen Horowitz partner Martin Casado says that traditional load balancers are now finally becoming decentralised.

 “ZeroLB is a fundamental concept to adopt in a decentralised world. By removing all of the complexity in a standardised, performant way, Kong is doing for load balancers what microservices have done to our legacy monoliths, and offering a horizontally scalable and portable way to load balance across every cloud including Kubernetes and virtual machines."

Kong Mesh 1.4 supports ZeroLB and is available for deployment now.