Having worked with many customers and prospects at Kong, one of the main requirements we often hear is how to handle dynamic routing based on the URL and headers. In this blog post, I will cover different use cases we come across for dynamic routing and how Kong can address them. The default behavior of an API gateway is to route the incoming request to the appropriate upstream service. If you are new to Kong, a Service object represents the upstream API or Service.

We are happy to announce the general availability of Kuma 0.7! This is very big release that includes countless improvements and updates, specifically when it comes to multi-zone deployments configuration and Kubernetes deployments. We strongly suggest to upgrade to this new version while paying attention to a few breaking changes that 0.7 introduces. For a complete list of features and updates, take a look at the full changelog.

Kibana and the rest of the ELK stack (Elasticsearch, Kibana, Logstash) is great for parsing and visualizing API logs for a variety of use cases. As an open-source project, it’s free to get started (you need to still factor in any compute and storage cost which is not cheap for analytics).

Behavioral email is the keystone of user-centric platform integration — emails to developers are most effective when they’re based on how they used your platform. Not surprisingly, the concept of segmenting your customers into groups of similar behaviors or attitudes is a well established best practice in marketing. MarketSherpa’s survey found that one of the most effective marketing strategies is to send emails based on the behavior of your customers.

At Kong, I get a chance to discuss with various organizations their plans and projects to adopt microservices and expose them with APIs. During these discussions, I’ve started to recognize some patterns that appear with regularity – patterns that have less to do with technology than with people. Technologists and engineers like myself usually do not pay too much attention to the “softer” aspects of technology implementations.

Before I met with Verifone’s executive team in London last year, candidly I didn’t know much about the company. But after learning about how the company is a global leader in payments solutions at the point of sale, with over 35 million payment terminals worldwide, now I see their logo everywhere I go!

We are happy to announce the first release in the 2.1 series of our flagship open source API gateway! Since Kong 2.0 was released in January, we have released a number of patch releases, but we have also been busy writing new features as well! This release comes packed with new functionality, ranging from updates for improved P99 latency to new features for gRPC, improvements to your favorite plugins and much more. Here are the highlights.

This past July 2 marked the end of my first year at Kong after joining with the acquisition of Insomnia – and quite a year it’s been. Prior to the acquisition, I was struggling to keep Insomnia’s momentum going as an indie. My time was spread thin, and I could no longer affect meaningful change.

In support of our partnership with AWS, we’re re-examining how some of our major customers today are using Kong with AWS. To this end, let’s look at our popular case study with Cargill. For over 150 years, Cargill has been on a mission to nourish the world in a safe, responsible and sustainable way.

As more and more data is exposed via APIs either as API-first companies or for the explosion of single page apps/JAMStack, API security can no longer be an afterthought. The hard part about APIs is that it provides direct access to large amounts of data while bypassing browser precautions. Instead of worrying about SQL injection and XSS issues, you should be concerned about the bad actor who was able to paginate through all your customer records and their data.

Worldwide, businesses are adapting to the new market conditions by transforming their current operating models to meet the new consumer demands and improve productivity, all while still focusing on achieving growth. In this new era, taking an outside-in approach to digital business ecosystems can help organizations harness their existing resources and relationships to drive new innovations and efficiency.

Kong Enterprise provides many out-of-the-box plugins to support various access control solutions like basic authentication, key authentication, JWT, LDAP, OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, among others. Most of the time, you should be able to find a plugin to suit your needs to protect your private or public APIs using Kong Enterprise without the need of writing your own plugins.

Once upon a time, we had these giant structures where thousands of people would congregate to share ideas, pamphlets filled to the margins with buzz words and cheap, branded t-shirts. Yep, tech conferences – oh what a relic of the past that I miss. It used to be part of my job to attend these.