If your business model involves selling to developers, you probably have already realized that much of the traditional processes and metrics applicable to traditional enterprise sales or consumer marketing don’t work. Specifically, selling to developers usually means attracting them to your platform and helping them succeed in building something, whether that’s a new app, integration, or automating an internal process.

In today’s unprecedented economic downturn, it’s more difficult than ever to find and close new customers. The onus is now on maintaining existing customers as productive users of your product. By closely monitoring API metrics, Customer Success Management (CSM) teams can get an early warning on those that are at risk of churning, and rectify things before it’s too late.

IDC forecast that 2019 would be the year when enterprise IT spending by departmental managers overtook spending by the IT department itself. Cloud-based on-demand services have become the norm by lowering barriers to technology purchases and enabling cost centre managers to quickly and easily deploy the software of their choice. Flexible subscription contracts gave access to an almost unlimited bank of resource to accommodate seasonal and periodic spikes in demand.

Today, we’re thrilled to announce the release of a major expansion to the Insomnia family of open source developer tools — Insomnia Designer! Providing a collaborative environment for editing GraphQL and REST APIs, Insomnia Designer allows developer teams to more easily embrace spec-first approaches to software design.

Today – April 28, 2020 – Kong celebrates its fifth anniversary since it was first open sourced by Mashape in 2015, starting a new era in the API landscape. This is how the Kong logo changed over the years.

As more companies realize the benefits of an API-first mindset and treating their APIs as products, there is a growing need for good API product management practices to make a company’s API strategy a reality. However, API product management is a relatively new field with little established knowledge on what is API product management and what a PM should be doing to ensure their API platform is successful.

Kong Enterprise provides customers with the fastest, most scalable and flexible API management solution in the market. One of Kong’s main advantages is the ability to quickly deploy and integrate with a customer’s ecosystem of already-deployed solutions for identity management and monitoring. As customers choose Kong to drive the decentralization of their applications, it’s critical to empower teams for end-to-end deployment while maintaining security and compliance.

A year ago, Harry Bagdi wrote an amazingly helpful blog post on observability for microservices. And by comparing titles, it becomes obvious that my blog post draws inspiration from his work. To be honest, that statement on drawing inspiration from Harry extends well beyond this one blog post – but enough about that magnificent man and more on why I chose to revisit his blog. When he published it, our company was doing an amazing job at one thing: API gateways.

We built Kong to handle any API at any level of scale, but running APIs at scale means storing and managing data at scale. That’s why we’ve always recommended Apache Cassandra for the biggest Kong deployments. Cassandra is powerful and proven, but it does require some skill to install and operate – which is why we’re excited to hear that Datastax is making Cassandra easy to use at any level of scale with DataStax Astra, a Database-as-a-Service built on Apache Cassandra.

“When you’re working from home you should try and do it systematically and methodologically”, says John Bennett a veteran work-at-homer. “It’s a lot like running a business from home, which is what I do”. John night know a thing or two about it, since he’s been working from home in upstate New Hampshire for the last 20 years.

With increasingly draconian measures worldwide aimed at keeping people at home to quell the spread of COVID-19, companies of all shapes and sizes and across the majority of industries are finding themselves in the same situation – how to equip and empower their workforce for mobile working. More than 5 million companies around the world will experience an impact at a cost to the global economy exceeding US$1 trillion.

2020 isn’t half done and society has already changed fundamentally. The COVID-19 pandemic has forced many people into unemployment because customers can’t visit their stores anymore. When revenue drops, business owners have to ask themselves: What part of their workforce is crucial to operating the company? For companies that sell software services to developers, you could get the impression that a “developer relations” (DevRel) team could be critical for that company.

We are very proud to announce some very important community updates for Kuma, with the goal of making Kuma more open and more inclusive to the broader open source ecosystem: The Kuma project now ships with open governance guidelines! This makes Kuma the only Envoy-based control plane for service mesh with an open governance policy in the CNCF landscape.

This is a companion piece to Jeremy Glassenberg’s talk at the March 2020, API and IPA Meetup in San Francisco. The full video of his talk is below and on Moesif’s YouTube Channel. As popular web services extend their developer platforms for partners to integrate directly into their interfaces, design trends are forming from experiences in the world of embedded integrations.

As APIs handle enormous amounts of data of a widely varying type, the critical question for any data provider is how specifically to secure this data. An authentication method that gives power to developers to build applications for all of their needs, determines who could access the APIs to protect sensitive data and ensure the request aren’t tempered. Authentication is when an entity proves an identity. Simply put, authentication is the act of verifying that you are who you claim to be.

There is no suprise that the applications in the mordern microservice architecture communicate by using all sorts of APIs, RESTful, GraphQL and more. API Gateways provides authentication, rate-limiting and access control between applications that expose their APIs and the consumer of the APIs are the bedrock of API infrastructure. Simple architecture which bundles API related functionality inside a single component provides load balancing, caching and ability to scale to ensure high availability.

We are pleased to announce the next release of our flagship enterprise offering, Kong Enterprise 1.5! This follow-up release adds additional stability and features on top of our last major release, Kong Enterprise 1.3, which we announced at Kong Summit 2019. Kong Enterprise 1.5 key features include Kong Immunity Consumer Alerts, OIDC improvements, and Kong Developer Portal Application Registration. There are also several smaller features and stability improvements packaged here.

As most software developers no doubt know, there are two primary models for API design: RPC and REST. Regardless of model, most modern APIs are implemented by mapping them in one way or another to the same HTTP protocol. It has also become common for RPC API designs to adopt one or two ideas from HTTP while staying within the RPC model, which has increased the range of choices that an API designer faces. This post tries to explain the choices, and give guidance on how to choose between them.

The principles behind performance testing API’s does not differ from the principles behind the performance testing of any application. Many API’s however are Asynchronous and a valid response from the API does not necessarily mean the transaction is complete which can cause a problem when measuring the performance of API’s. There are however ways around this and we will explore these in this post.