Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

October 2021

Getting Started With Kong Istio Gateway

Have you ever found yourself in a situation where all your service mesh services are running in Kubernetes, and now you need to expose them to the outside world securely and reliably? Ingress management is essential for your configuration and operations when exposing services outside of a cluster. You need to take care of the authentication, observability, encryption and integration with other third-party vendors alongside other policies.

SOC2 Certification

Speedscale Inc. has achieved SOC 2 Type I compliance in accordance with American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) standards for SOC for Service Organizations also known as SSAE 18. Achieving this standard with an unqualified opinion serves as third-party industry validation that Speedscale Inc. provides enterprise-level security for customer’s data secured in the Speedscale Inc. System. Speedscale Inc.

Zero-Touch Disaster Recovery With Ansible Automation Platform

Disaster Recovery (DR) is crucial to every organization. Business continuity is important whether you live in an area prone to natural disasters or need to prepare for unseen events like a data center outage. But how do you ensure that the changes behind the scenes don’t impact the end user? Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform (AAP) is the automation tool of choice for many enterprises.

7 Tips for Designing Great API Documentation

API automation is leading the way for data-driven digital transformation. When developers are able to build modern applications for a variety of devices without having to manage server-side code and complexity, and other departments can tap into a well-designed API documentation system instead of a silo of cumbersome, unorganized code bases, your company will be well on its way to an API-first delivery model.

Bringing Event Hooks to Your Kong Plugins

Event Hooks is a new Kong Enterprise feature launched in the Kong Gateway 2.5 Release. This feature sends you notifications when certain events happen on your Kong Gateway deployment. Kong Gateway listens for events, like routes, services, consumers, certificates, plugins, workspaces and RBAC roles created, updated or removed. You can also create or extend Kong Plugins and add the Event Hooks functionality for custom use cases.

Monitoring Azure API Management with Moesif

API gateways and management platforms like Azure API Management (APIM) are an excellent way to keep your APIs in order. They provide features that every API needs, like API keys, quotas, and caching in a standardized fashion. Your APIs will then behave more homogeneously and can be managed in a central place. They’re also the entry point to your cloud infrastructure and can help you abstract implementation from the interface.

The Next Frontier: Container Orchestration

In part 1 of this series on Kubernetes, we discussed how companies like VMware offer the necessary tools to launch, monitor, create and destroy virtual machines. In this post, we review how – much like virtual machines – containers need to be created, monitored, destroyed and relaunched to account for the health of the physical or virtual machines on which they run.

6 ways Moesif API alerts can help your engineering, customer success, and sales teams

The ability to monitor your APIs is an important functionality for any business that is driven by APIs. Beyond API monitoring and observability is the ability to actively create alerts for specific conditions. Moesif is a fantastic platform to utilize alerts with. With our platform, all of your API and user data can be compiled into a single place. it’s a great way to easily configure a wide variety of useful alerts for your REST, GraphQL, and other APIs.

Monitoring Azure API Management with Moesif

API gateways and management platforms like Azure API Management (APIM) are an excellent way to keep your APIs in order. They provide features that every API needs, like API keys, quotas, and caching in a standardized fashion. Your APIs will then behave more homogeneously and can be managed in a central place. They’re also the entry point to your cloud infrastructure and can help you abstract implementation from the interface.

6 Best Practices for RESTful API Design: Lessons From the Field

Many businesses need to build an API for their customers to use, but many businesses also struggle with making their API easy for customers to use. DreamFactory makes it easier for developers to design RESTful APIs. It builds on the best practices in web-based software development, allowing developers to design RESTful APIs without cumbersome hand-coding. RESTful API design is a critical part of developing APIs, so it’s important to know the best practices for RESTful API design and implementation.

Kong Ingress Controller 2.0: UDP Support, Prometheus Integrations, and More!

As the most robust, scaleable and extensible version of our Kubernetes Ingress Controller to date, the KIC 2.0 release takes a major architectural leap forward. In this video, @Viktor Gamov, a principal developer advocate with Kong, explains and demonstrates the most exciting features from our latest release.

Automating the API Lifecycle With APIOps: Part II

In the last blog post, we discussed the need for both speed and quality for your API delivery and how APIOps can help achieve both. In this part of our blog post series, we’ll walk through what the API lifecycle looks like when following APIOps. We’re still following the best practice we’ve established in the industry over the years, but what you’re going to see is that the processes we follow at each step of the API lifecycle – and between each step – have changed.

Cloud Testing at Facebook

At Speedscale, we are on the cutting edge of defining autonomous testing for the cloud era. However, we aren’t the only company trying to solve this problem and we enjoy learning from every perspective. That’s why Facebook’s recent blog article about autonomous testing caught my eye. They’ve built a sophisticated autonomous test system that introduces many of the same techniques we utilize.

Why Your Company Needs API Management

When you need to get new features and products out the door fast, API management is the driving force to keeping everything on track. According to the "State of API Integration 2020" report by Cloud Elements, 83 percent of respondents say that API integration has become a critical part of their business strategy as they move forward on their digital transformation efforts. Leveraging integrations is what helps these companies agile and able to respond quickly to customer demands.

Getting Your Developers to See Value With a Great Developer Experience

One of the beauties of working with APIs is their convenient and practical ways to share data and applications. APIs have enabled a transformational shift from an interface that relied on custom integrations to now a relatively streamlined process. That said, because of their agile framework, some companies have overlooked the importance of providing a great developer integration experience and are not taking the necessary steps to help drive the Time To First Hello World.

How API Management Works

According to Paolo Malinverno, research vice president at Gartner, “We already live in an API economy where CIOs must look beyond APIs as technology and instead build their company's business models, digital strategies, and ecosystems on them." Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) represent reusable code that forms the backbone of these digital transformation strategies. Understanding how API management works can help you determine how best to leverage your systems to gain the most value.

Leveraging APIs to create value for telco ecosystems: STC's digital transformation

The world is changing for telecommunications operators. We live in a digital age when people, information, and services are more connected than ever, and people expect virtually any service on demand, at their fingertips. STC is already a telecommunications leader in the Middle East, but to remain on top in a competitive field, we must continue to grow and provide valuable experiences for our customers.

Kong Ingress Controller 2.0 Now GA! UDP Support, Prometheus Integrations, and More!

Today, we’re thrilled to announce the general availability of Kong Ingress Controller 2.0 (KIC) – the most robust, scalable, and extensible version of our Kubernetes Ingress Controller to date. This is a major milestone both for the KIC product as well as for the Kong community as a whole. In addition to KIC 2.0’s new features, it also sets the foundation for us to more rapidly improve the user experience and add more capabilities.

Automating the API Lifecycle with APIOps: Part I

Today, Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and microservices are the de-facto standard for building and connecting modern applications. APIs are no longer just a delivery mechanism but have become the product itself. API lifecycle management refers to the comprehensive, step-by-step process of planning, developing, implementing, testing, and versioning an API.

Using GitHub Actions to Build With the Language You With Ben Greenberg | Kongcast Episode 3

There’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to developers. In this Kongcast episode, Ben Greenberg, Developer Advocate at Orbit, chats with us about building better engineering communities and focusing on the outcomes rather than technology. At the end, he shows us how he leveraged GitHub Actions to create a copy-and-paste workflow that integrates services, no matter the language they’re written in.

Xplenty's Rest API Component Tutorial

In this video, we will set up a Rest API connector using Xplenty. Combining your business data in one secure destination is desirable if you want to analyze and operationalize that data at scale. Xplenty's REST API connector helps you connect to many popular business SaaS and other digital services. Advanced Features of Xplenty's REST API Connector Pagination Schemes When retrieving data in large amounts, it is typical for any API to incorporate a paging mechanism. The commonly used methods for pagination are.

Optimistic Locking in Rails REST APIs

Imagine the following hypothetical scenario: in a rental property management system, Employee A starts editing contact info for Rental X, adding some extra phone numbers. Around the same time, Employee B notices a typo in the contact info for exactly that Rental X and performs an update. A couple of minutes later, Employee A updates Rental X’s contact info with the new phone numbers, and … the update fixing the typo is now gone! That’s definitely not great!

How to Migrate a MuleSoft API to Kong Gateway in 5 Minutes

These days, a lot of companies are moving towards cloud native applications and declarative configurations. This is also true for the traditional API gateways (e.g., MuleSoft, Axway, etc). Customers are looking for new technologies which fit better in their cloud environments and also are faster and cheaper. The main challenge here is how to migrate the existing APIs to the new platform.

Building a Multi-Region Service Mesh with Kuma/Envoy, Anycast BGP, and mTLS

We're kind of crazy about providing the fastest way to deploy applications globally. As you might already know, we're building a serverless platform exactly for this purpose. We recently wrote about how the Koyeb Serverless Engine runs microVMs to host your Services but we skipped a big subject: Global Networking. Global Networking is a big way of saying "How are my requests processed?". A short answer is: requests go through our edge network before reaching your services hosted on our core locations.

5 Best Practices for Successful Microservices Implementation

Microservices are a popular and modern organizational software engineering practice. The guiding principle of any microservices implementation is to develop an application by dividing its business components into smaller services that can be deployed and operated independently of each other. The separation of concerns between services is defined as “service boundaries.”

How Kubernetes Is Modernizing the Microservices Architecture

In this three-part blog series, we examine the critical role Kubernetes plays in shaping the future of infrastructure, including the rise of containers and Kubernetes. The first in the series covers Next-Generation Application Development. The second covers the Next Frontier: Container Orchestration. And the third covers How Kubernetes Gets Work Done.

Best practices for securing your applications and APIs using Apigee

Enterprises across the globe are seeing surging demand for digital experiences from their customers, employees, and partners. For many of these enterprises, hundreds of business applications are hosted in private or public clouds that interact with their users (customers, partners, and employees) spread across geographies, channels (web, mobile, APIs, VPNs, and cloud services), and time zones.

Clone Yourself Through Automation to Get That Next Job

If you could clone yourself, you could get your work done a lot faster, right? And that would free up time for you to pursue new projects and advance your career. It’s an idea that Kong Vice President of Products Reza Shafii discussed recently as part of Destination: Automation, a free digital event that explored ways organizations can embrace automation to make applications and underlying technology stacks more efficient, secure and resilient.

How to Deploy an API Gateway Within a CI/CD Pipeline

Continuous integration and continuous deployment—known colloquially as CI/CD—are essential strategies for building modern software applications. The goal of these processes is to foster a culture of continuous updates. CI is the process by which an external machine (not your local development environment) fetches your app and dependencies and then runs a test suite to ensure everything in your application builds and runs correctly.

Kong Gateway 2.6 Now Generally Available!

Today, we are proud to announce the general availability (GA) of Kong Gateway 2.6! Kong Gateway 2.6 brings some of the most requested features by users and customers to date. Be sure to upgrade or try out a fresh install today! Kong Gateway 2.6 compatible releases will be available with Konnect, our SaaS platform, shortly! Read on for more details of the included functionality.

7 Tips for Building an API Management Strategy

With tech constantly innovating, various tools and software need to be able to work simultaneously. API's are what makes this possible. The API provides software with a way to interact and communicate. This is how different applications connect, whether it's two internal apps or integrating an app into another company's platform. However, with APIs, as in any software integration, many challenges are likely to arise. To mitigate these challenges, an API management strategy should be in place.

Online Meetup: Controlling your Kong Gateway with decK and CI/CD

In this session, DevRel Director Micheal Heap will show you Kong’s declarative configuration capabilities and how to use your CI system to lint and apply these configurations in a variety of environments. Test your changes in a staging environment, then apply exactly the same config to production with a click of a button.

5 Common Mistakes When Developing APIs

An API essentially paly the role of a software intermediary that allows two applications to talk to each other. Every time you use an application like Facebook, send an instant message, or check the weather on your phone, you are using an API. The API is more than middleware however — it’s grown into an innovative business concept that can transform your business and digital strategy. When using APIs though, there are a variety of mistakes that developers can make.

A Beginner's Guide to Microservices

Microservices are a style of architecture used by many organizations for software development. In the past, the IT industry used monolithic or service-oriented architecture (SOA) solutions as the standard. However, the lack of dynamic scalability of this type of architectural system is no longer adequate for the increasing complexity of today’s infrastructures. Microservices addresses this by providing a highly agile and scalable alternative.

The Life of an API Gateway Request (Part 1)

The inner workings of an API gateway request can be difficult to understand because of its scale. To provide some orientation, we will use the real world as a reference, from planet-spanning infrastructure to a person eating a chocolate bar (processing a server response in a plugin). This series will divide the abstraction space of how Kong Gateway processes requests into four different layers.

Managing APIs at Scale in a Kubernetes Environment - Part II

In the last blog, we discussed the challenges in managing APIs at scale in a Kubernetes environment. We also discussed how deploying a Kubernetes Ingress Controller or an API gateway can help you address those challenges. In this blog, we will briefly touch upon some of the similarities and differences between an API gateway and Kubernetes Ingress. We will also discuss a unique approach offered by Kong for the end-to-end lifecycle API management (APIM) in Kubernetes.

Sponsored Post

Application Logging in 2021

Have you ever written a Hello, World! application? In most of these tutorials the first step is to log words to the console. It's an easy way to understand what is going on with your application and readily available in every programming language. The console output is incredibly powerful, and it has become easier than ever to capture that output as logs. As your application grows and evolves you need to implement a structured application log approach.

Token-Based Access Control With Kong, OPA and Curity

As APIs and microservices evolve, the architecture used to secure these resources must also mature. Utilizing a token-based architecture to protect APIs is a robust, secure and scalable approach, and it is also much safer than API keys or basic authentication. However, token-based architecture comes in varying maturity levels, as outlined by the API Security Maturity Model.

5 Common API Management Tools and their Usage

Customers today expect feature-reach and user-friendly access to technology that makes their lives easier. They expect to use this technology to engage with companies anywhere, anytime, and with any device. Organizations must be able to not just meet, but exceed, these expectations. Failing to do so could result in lost revenue as customers move on to competitors.

Microservices Trends: The Top 4 Trends That Will Shape Microservices Development In 2022

Unlike a traditional monolithic approach, in which all components form an inseparable entity, microservices work in synergy to accomplish the same tasks while being separate. Each of these components or processes is a microservice. Granular and lightweight, this type of software development allows a similar process to be used in multiple applications. This is a key element in optimizing application development for a cloud-native model.

ZeroLB in a Decentralized World

One of the things that’s quite interesting about service mesh is that it has not been a very well-defined category for a very long time. Service mesh is not a means to an end. By looking at its adoption, we’ve been seeing a refocus on the end use case that service mesh allows us to enable. Some are around observability while others are around security and trust – being able to provide that identity to all of our services.

Services Don't Have to Be Eight-9s Reliable

In our first episode of Kongcast, I had the pleasure of speaking with Liz Fong-Jones, principal developer advocate at Honeycomb, about the concept of error budgets for service level objectives (SLOs) and how to accelerate software delivery with observability. Check out the transcript and video from our conversation below, and be sure to subscribe to get email alerts for the latest new episodes.

Google named a leader in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Full Life Cycle API Management

We’re excited to share that Gartner has recognized Google Cloud’s Apigee as a Leader in the 2021 Magic Quadrant for Full Life Cycle API Management, marking the sixth time in a row we’ve earned this recognition. We believe this achievement is a testimony to Google Cloud’s differentiated vision for API management and strong track record of delivering continuous product innovation.