Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

December 2020

How to add Moesif API Analytics and Monitoring to Kong Ingress Controller

Kong is a popular open-source API gateway to help manage your APIs. With Kong, you can handle authentication, rate limiting, data transformation, among other things from a centralized location even though you have multiple microservices. Kong is built on NGINX at it’s core, one of the most popular HTTP servers. Being open-source, Kong is very easy to deploy on-premises usually in just a few minutes without requiring the installation of many components other than a Postgres or Cassandra store.

Podcast on How to Build an API-First Company with Nick Patrick, Radar CEO

Ep. 6: Nick Patrick, CEO of Radar On today’s episode we have Nick Patrick, the CEO of API-first location platform company Radar. Nick cut his teeth in PM roles at Microsoft, Foursquare and Handy, before starting Radar in 2016. As cofounder and leader of Radar, Nick shares his experience on how to fuel growth, choose your partners, ship products faster & with confidence, and many more invaluable perspectives for professionals in the API platform ecosystem.

Accelerating the Build-Out of Digital Platform in the Public Cloud

In this Kong Summit 2020 session, we will cover the architecture and approach we used to build out our digital platform at Goldman Sachs by leveraging Kong’s API gateway to implement a secure ingress controller for all digital channels, including private/public API and web interfaces. We will discuss how we integrated Kong’s API gateway with AWS native services to implement mTLS, observability and container runtime, as well as share our operational experience of running resilient API workloads in production.

Automating Contract-Centric Experiences to Accelerate Front End Development

This Kong Summit 2020 session focuses on the war stories, and subsequently the patterns HyperCurrent employed, from building an API chargeback/monetization product using OAS, Kotlin, Spring Boot and Kong. We will discuss how a programmatic approach can be used to deliver an elegant REST-ful API while enforcing an anti-corruption layer for domain logic without writing API contracts by hand. By using Kotlin and Spring Boot along with a controller/DTO approach, we can automatically produce an OAS contract, HTML docs, a console and a client side SDK.

Podcast with Charles Miller on Documentation Best Practices

Ep. 5: Charles Miller, documentation strategist. To help you fend off documentation from being the Achillies heel of your API product, we have a thirty-year veteran of technical writing on our podcast today. Charles Miller is currently the lead content strategist for APIs at Medidata Solutions, a Dassault Systems company.

Comcast's Self-Service API Gateway Development Journey

Comcast has taken a journey to develop an API gateway initially using open source software and in-house enhancements, and later transitioning to open core commercial software to improve the overall service delivery experience for developers. In this session, Comcast will discuss enhancements that the team made to adapt the community edition of Kong, and subsequently the enterprise edition, to support a self-service, multi-tenant, yet still managed, production API gateway solution, as well as open source contributions made to the Kong community along the way.

Collaborative API Design and Testing with Insomnia

Insomnia Designer is a collaborative API design tool for designing and managing OpenAPI specs. This session will cover how to design and test APIs, as well as how to extend Insomnia with custom plugins. Kong Champion Mert Simsek will dive into how as a team is leveraging Insomnia Designer to share information and data APIs across teams to improve their overall process.

The role of the IT Manager in Leading Digital Transformation

As organizations embrace digital transformation, the IT industry has had to change along with it. Expectations are high for the potential effects of implementing new and emerging technologies and organizations are competing to keep pace. With this desire for rapid change, IT managers have been faced with mounting pressure to adopt tools, process and models of digital business as part of enterprise digital transformation initiatives.

Day 0 to Day 2 With Kuma, Helm and Kubernetes | FinTech Studios

During the early days of finding product-market fit, clouds were small. Often, we start with an EC2 instance here, a managed service there, then some Docker containers, microservices, and wait, Kubernetes! As clouds grow with the teams that maintain them, stable relics and legacy systems remain in production. The effort first goes towards building the future and satisfying clients — they’re paying!

Considerations for Deploying a Multi-Cloud Architecture with Kong Gateway, Kuma Service Mesh and Aviatrix

Building a multi-region or multi-cloud environment for your applications requires a lot of attention. In a typical deployment, you would have an API gateway running close to the several application runtimes. You should enhance your deployment to support different regions in a given cloud, or in an even more distributed and hybrid scenario, multiple services running across other public clouds and on-premise environments.

Digital Transformation: What Does It Mean for Enterprise Organizations?

From tiny startups to massive Fortune 500 firms, businesses of all sizes and industries are making heavier investments in digital transformation initiatives. Yet despite this increased awareness and effort, too many large enterprises are still struggling to adapt to a rapidly changing business landscape.

Decentralizing API Design at NAB | National Australia Bank

Continuing on the journey of building a new API platform, NAB’s primary focus this year has been improving API quality by building tooling for API design and API governance. This Kong Summit 2020 session will cover NAB’s new API search capability, which allows quick API discovery across the organization, and how the team implemented decentralized API governance.

What is Low Code?

Businesses are increasingly demanding new software solutions that are quick, efficient, and user friendly. Low code is a way to automate several steps of the application process while still providing rapid delivery. In simplest terms, low code is a way of building processes and applications with very little coding. There are several aspects of this type of software development you need to understand when fully answering the question, what is low code?

Deploy With Ease and Enable API Automation With Scale

Microservices is a technology that is leading the march toward digital transformation in the world of application development. As the number of APIs increase, the need for a single entry point into the system becomes necessary. This means that a secured, robust, agile API gateway is highly important. However, what we often forget is that the API deployments must also move up with the CI/CD model, along with other components of the project.

JWT Claims With Rate Limiting in Kong

In Kong, plugins can be thought of as policy enforcers. In the case of rate limiting, Kong offers two plugins: An open source one and Enterprise. Both plugins can limit requests per consumer, route, service or globally. Configuring the same plugin is also possible on a more than level. When this occurs, an order of precedence is used to determine which configuration to run. With this capability, it is possible to apply fine-grained policy control. In this article, we cover an advanced use case.

Enter the Next Level: Migrating to Cloud Native Platform

Organizations are moving from centralized data centers to distributed cloud native platforms. Due to the complexity of such a migration, an organization would be running a hybrid multi-platform environment which spans from the old to the new world. It starts at the edge of a system, using functionality provided by an API gateway or platform.

Digital Transformation: What Does It Mean for Small and Medium-Sized Businesses?

Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are the lifeblood of the economy: according to Deloitte, companies with fewer than 500 employees represent 99.7 percent of all businesses in the U.S., and employ 48 percent of the private workforce. Yet despite their sheer numbers, SMBs don’t have access to the power, budget, and resources that larger organizations can wield, particularly when it comes to digital transformation.

Distributed API Management: What You Need to Know

APIs (application programming interfaces) are an essential, yet often overlooked, component of the modern organization’s IT environment. According to a 2020 study, 83 percent of IT professionals and executives say that API integration is “critical” to their business strategy. These days, a single organization may rely on dozens or hundreds of third-party APIs, each of which may have a significant downstream effect on a company’s productivity and profitability.

Distributed Multi-Cloud and Multi-Cluster Service Mesh | Kong Mesh

Are you an enterprise architect who is currently facing the challenge to secure and observe service connectivity across every cloud and every cluster, including hybrid Kubernetes and VM environments? Kong Mesh, built on top of CNCF’s Kuma and Envoy, is a universal service mesh delivering simplicity and scalability to every application.

How to Log API Traffic from Envoy Proxy and Monitor Metrics with Moesif

Envoy is a high-performance C++ distributed proxy designed for microservices and service-oriented architecture, as well as a scalable communication bus and “universal data plane” designed for large scale service meshes. Envoy runs alongside every application and abstracts the network by providing common features in a platform-agnostic manner.

Using Sendgrid with Moesif API Analytics to Send Behavioral Emails

In this guide you’ll learn how to send Moesif behavioral emails with Sendgrid. Moesif behavioral emails is a feature that automatically sends emails to customers based on their API usage. This can be used to notify customers about technical issues, such as hitting rate limits, using deprecated APIs, or broken integrations. You can even use it to trigger business-related events such as when an item is shipped. If something can be mapped to an API call, then you can send an email from it.

From Zero to Hero: A Roadmap for Automating the Dev Lifecycle Across Any Environment with GitOps

Organizations that embrace GitOps are able to develop and automate their end-to-end software development lifecycle by combining the power of Git, CI/CD and Kubernetes. However the path to get there can be rocky: operating in a multi-cloud environment, working with hybrid microservice and monolith APIs, helping teams discover and publish APIs to use, and moving legacy services to Kubernetes pose no shortage of organizational and technical challenges.

Podcast with Mike Amundsen

Ep. 4: Mike Amundsen, author and speaker Joining us this week we have the well known author and speaker Mike Amundsen. He’s a prolific writer on all things APIs and recently released his latest book entitled Design and Build Great Web APIs: Robust, Reliable, and Resilient. When he’s not writing, Mike helps companies capitalize on opportunities in APIs, Microservices, and Digital Transformation.

Sauce Acquires API Fortress; Adds API Testing Capabilities

By now you may have seen the news that Sauce Labs has acquired API Fortress, a leading provider of modern API testing solutions for agile and DevOps teams. This is an exciting milestone for us, and we are thrilled to welcome the capable API Fortress team into the Sauce Labs team! Here, I’d like to go into a bit more depth on why we did this acquisition and what this will mean for our customers.

Digital Transformation: What Does It Mean for Developers?

Businesses of all sizes and industries are increasingly turning to digital transformations in order to make smarter, data-driven decisions, thereby gaining a competitive advantage over their competitors and better serving their customers. Yet as more and more companies adopt this forward-looking stance, what’s the role of developers in this new world of digital transformation?

How Organizations Can Leverage Kubernetes as a Universal Computing Standard

With the universal adoption of Kubernetes across cloud and data center platforms, organizations now enjoy a level of consistency across heterogenous infrastructure like never before. This opens up interesting challenges and opportunities for application deployment and IT operations. In this talk, we will discuss how organizations deploy Kubernetes across cloud, data center, branch offices and the edge. We will also cover how organizations can build a universal computing platform across multiple Kubernetes clusters running on heterogenous infrastructure. As a result, they get unprecedent application portability, deployment agility, security and control.

Building Enterprise Microapps with DreamFactory and Citrix Workspace

Microapps help employees get work done faster, providing a highly tailored user interface, mobile-first experience, and push notifications to quickly power through daily responsibilities. Thanks to the native microapp builder Citrix Workspace users have access to a particularly powerful solution for creating microapps, and the builder can easily plug into the DreamFactory platform in order to almost instantly generate modern user interfaces for twenty different databases including Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, MongoDB, and others.

Top 8 API Security Threats Every API Team Should Know

Join us to unpack more than just the OWASP Security API list as we look to identify what every API developer should consider when building APIs. Does your current API management solution support security best practice or are you opening yourself up to data spills and violations? Connect Everything with Autogenerated APIs An enterprise-grade API platform available in the cloud or on-premise. Generate database APIs instantly to build applications faster.

API Functional Testing- A Critical Part Of Your Security Plan

Functional tests help you to both catch vulnerabilities before your API goes into production and also monitor the health of your API moving forward. Learn how to optimise functional testing to become a core aspect of your security plan and prevent unauthorized access and unsavory data spills.

How Papa John's Fast-Tracked External API Innovation With Kong

To keep pace with the company’s rapidly growing menu innovation strategy and expansion to digital channels, elevating the API strategy became a priority at Papa John’s. Learn how the team reduced time to market and enabled API innovation with the growing list of external channels. This session will discuss deploying Kong in a hybrid environment, making use of the Kong Developer Portal and integrating to a CI/CD pipeline to automate deployments.

3 Solutions for Avoiding Plain-Text Passwords in Insomnia

When testing APIs, software engineers often repeat identical values across multiple requests, but who wants to waste time typing the same values every time? Insomnia’s environment variables solve this problem by allowing you to define a value once as an environment variable and reference that value wherever it’s needed. Insomnia also enables you to override certain variables using sub-environments or folder environments.

Digital Transformation: What Does It Mean for Different Industries?

Digital technologies have been advancing at a breakneck pace, and companies are taking advantage in order to beat their competitors and better serve their customers. According to the 2018 “State of the CIO” report, 40 percent of IT budgets are now allocated for the express purpose of digital transformation regardless of industry. What’s more, 70 percent of companies say that they either already have a digital transformation strategy, or they’re working on putting one into place.

How to Achieve Zero-Trust Security With Service Mesh | Kong Summit 2020

Are you an enterprise architect who is currently facing the challenge to secure and observe service connectivity across every cloud and every cluster? Kong Mesh, built on top of CNCF’s Kuma and Envoy, is a universal service mesh tailored to the enterprise architect that must provide modern and secure connectivity to the applications that the teams are building.

Infrastructure and Software Development: What Got Us Here Won't Get Us There

In this fireside chat, industry leaders with experience driving revolutions in software development and infrastructure will discuss transitions to microservices, Kubernetes, cloud native and open source across industries. The panel will also discuss how requirements have changed, and what paths these technologies and architectures could take in the future.

Top 5 API Integration Platforms for 2021

A quick search on “the top API integration platforms for 2021” brings up so many contenders that it’s difficult to understand your options. In fact, the top API integration platforms are so distinct in features that it’s surprising they all fall under the same “API integration” category. In this guide, you’ll find API integration platforms that serve as: So, which solution is right for your use-case?

Digital Transformation Challenges Organizations Need To Overcome

In recent years, Digital Transformation has become a strategic priority for organizations. Significant investment has been made across many companies to create strategic and organizational capabilities that enable them to compete in the contemporary digital arena. However, it is not trivial; organizations face numerous challenges in their digital transformation journey. There is no panacea, and the combination of tool and process choices can make or break an operation.

How to Set Up Kong Gateway

You’ve decided to install Kong Gateway. Congrats! You’re almost ready to accelerate your microservices journey with the world’s most popular open source API gateway. This article and video will guide you through the short version of our tutorial. If you prefer, here are some more detailed instructions. If you haven’t already, make sure you’ve installed Kong before getting started. It should only take a few minutes.

Learnings from CNCF's Envoy and OPA Creators Matt Klein and Tim Hinrichs

Applications architected as microservices are becoming more prevalent every day, but just like their monolithic ancestors, microservice applications must adhere to organization-wide constraints around compliance, security, performance, etc. Authorization — controlling which people and machines can perform which actions — is a foundational security problem that requires new solutions in a microservice world because of changes in requirements around performance, availability and even where authorization gets enforced architecturally.

Fast & Curious: Find and Fix Slow Queries & API Requests

AppSignal was built because we were tired of slow and clumsy monitoring setups. Instead, we built monitoring that’s easy yet powerful - an intuitive interface enables you to figure out what’s happening in no time. Today, our team made finding slow events effortless. We’ve fully overhauled our slow events feature, helping developers to quickly find and fix slow queries and API requests.

Rest vs SOAP: The Key Differences You Need To Know

When choosing between these two popular web API (application programming interface) formats it can be surprisingly difficult to know which one you should select for your infrastructure. Although both Rest (Representational State Transfer) and SOAP(Simple Object Access Protocol) share attributes in common with how they handle HTTP protocols, there are a number of key differences as discussed in this article.