Kong, managing a complex microservices architecture, faced challenges around developer productivity and collaboration. Augment helped streamline their development processes, enabling engineers to focus on high-level problem-solving.

The Challenge

Kong runs an API management platform that supports key internal services like identity, authorization, audit logging, and notifications. Their tech stack includes Go microservices, TypeScript apps, PostgreSQL, and DynamoDB, all deployed in a complex Kubernetes environment. Developers often struggled with repetitive tasks and switching between languages, making it hard to focus on bigger engineering problems. Collaboration was also challenging due to the distributed, global nature of the team. 

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Nick Anderson, Senior Engineer at Kong, explains:

“We have Go microservices, TypeScript applications, relational stores like Postgres, and a bit of NoSQL with Dynamo. It’s a complex environment with Kubernetes, pods, consumers, and API servers.”​

Why Kong Chose Augment

• Improved Focus on Complex Problems: Augment automates routine coding tasks, allowing developers to spend more time on strategic, high-level decisions. “Augment has been very helpful in trying to let me focus on solving the problems instead of writing the code that solves the problems.”​

• Cross-Language Support: With support for multiple languages, Augment makes it easy for developers to switch between Go and TypeScript without losing productivity. “There’s lower-level conversations going on, and more higher-level understanding across the team. That way we’re able to work individually and accelerate as a team.”

• Faster Onboarding for New Engineers: Augment's ability to explain code in simple terms helps new engineers get up to speed faster, improving the team’s overall productivity. "It helps drive understanding... If it's integrated into the IDE, you can select and explain this, like an 'explain it to me like I'm five' level. There's more lower-level conversations going on and higher-level understanding across the team."​

• Streamlined Code Generation and Testing: Augment helps developers quickly generate skeletons for code and tests, reducing the need for manual, repetitive work. “I wrote probably one of the best code comments I could think to write... and the prompt generation in an end-to-end solution was very close.”

Results & Benefits

With Augment, Kong experienced significant improvements in developer efficiency, collaboration, and onboarding speed. Augment allowed their engineers to focus on solving complex problems while automating repetitive tasks and improving cross-language support.

“There was a certain moment where I decided that I would bake it into my development workflow day to day, not just as a play tool.”

Key benefits

• Reduced Context-Switching: Augment helped developers switch between Go and TypeScript more seamlessly, minimizing the mental load of working across multiple languages. "It’s a lot easier to have more meaningful conversations... There’s no need to spend the first 10 minutes looking things up."
• Increased Code Consistency: Augment's ability to generate boilerplate and skeleton code helped maintain consistency across projects, ensuring code quality. "We can describe how packages should be constructed, and the tools write the skeleton, so we can focus on refining it."
• Better Documentation Practices: Augment enhanced how the team produced documentation, making it easier to generate meaningful and useful documentation directly from the code. "There’s a big push for OAS-driven code generation... If we could influence that pipeline with GenAI, we could construct documentation that's meaningful."
• Improved Focus on Edge Cases and Testing: With Augment handling routine tasks, developers could focus more on testing and ensuring edge cases were covered, improving software reliability. "It drives hard negative testing... Making sure that your edge cases, your failure cases are well handled."​

About Kong

Kong enables any company to become an API-first company. Kong’s unified cloud native API platform is easy to use and works in any environment — unleashing developer productivity, automating security, and boosting performance of APIs and microservices at scale.

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Industry: Software Development

Location: San Francisco, California

Team Size: 234

Languages, Frameworks, Libraries: Go, Typescript, Vue, Lua, Markdown, NoSQL, Postgres

IDE: VS Code, IntelliJ

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