Cloud connectivity company Kong has introduced a new concept called ZeroLB and a breakthrough pattern for load balancing. The company also announced the general availability of Kong Mesh 1.4, with industry-first features to support ZeroLB out of the box, offering up to 4x improvement in network performance and a substantial cost reduction compared to traditional centralized LB-based architectures.

ZeroLB is a modern, decentralized load balancing pattern that aims to remove every load balancer that is being deployed in front of individual services and applications. In this capacity, ZeroLB eliminates the need for elastic cloud load balancers, software load balancers and hardware load balancers from the equation.

Kong Mesh is an enterprise-grade service mesh built on top of CNCF’s Kuma and Envoy. This modern control plane is focused on simplicity, security and scalability for multi-cloud and multi-cluster environments on both Kubernetes and VMs.

The 1.4 release enables modern, decentralized and portable load balancing that works across every cloud, including Kubernetes and VMs, and local development machines that improve accuracy and replicability, therefore lowering unexpected production errors. It provides automatic resiliency across clusters, clouds and regions.

Key features in Kong Mesh 1.4 include: five different decentralized load balancing algorithms, which include round robin, least request, ring hash, maglev and random; L4 + L7 load balancing to address every service type, from databases and events to HTTP and gRPC services; as well as automatic self-healing capabilities with health checks, circuit breakers, zone-aware load balancing and cross-zone connectivity capabilities.

Kong Mesh 1.4 is available now. It can be deployed in minutes with a single command, in any environment.