In this blog post series, we have discussed how Kubernetes enhances a container-based microservices architecture. We examine the rise of containers and Kubernetes to understand the organizational and technical advantages of each, including a deep dive into the ways Kubernetes can improve processes for deploying, scaling and managing containerized applications. The first in the series covered Next-Generation Application Development. The second covered the Next Frontier: Container Orchestration.

We have launched a redesign of Moesif’s in-app experience and it’s a big one! As part of our journey to give our users the best experience possible, we’ve streamlined our in-app navigation. This update makes it easier to find key features in Moesif and will hopefully allow even existing users to see some features they haven’t used before but may be useful. As with all changes, big and small, there may be a learning curve.

Fast access to data is more important now than ever before. Native applications often can produce that extra bit of performance that makes the difference. But the push to leverage lower level APIs comes with its own set of challenges and costs. SourcePro has been designed to allow you to focus on solving your business problems instead of getting bogged down in unclear and error prone low-level API coding.

An application programming interface (API) value chain connects you to your customers through a series of partners. Unlike browser-based web apps where your customers buy goods or services directly from your website. APIs are a vital component of your digital business strategy. They help you analyze data and enable a multi-cloud strategy that can dramatically accelerate your time-to-market. Once you know how to create API value chains, you can implement them right away.

Will your software perform well during peak hours? Can it handle the load during sales periods? Is your infrastructure valid if you double your sales by the end of the year? These are just some of the questions that scalability testing can help you answer. Scalability testing evaluates the activity level of your application by upscaling and downscaling the number of users.

From the modern application platform perspective, products should allow architects and DevOps teams to support dynamic topologies. That means a multi-platform capability is required but not sufficient. In fact, for several reasons, companies are looking for hybrid deployments to run their applications on several platforms simultaneously. Moreover, the topology should support and adjust for new and continuous architecture changes.

In February 2021, we announced the GA of Kong Konnect, the first cloud native service connectivity platform that gives organizations the flexibility of protecting their API and service traffic while simultaneously taking advantage of 10x ops improvements via the cloud control plane.

The iPaaS market is clearly growing now at a faster pace than ever anticipated. This is not only due to the pandemic forcing companies to accelerate the digital transformation, but also in general due to the rise of SaaS. The replacement of older, server-bound software solutions with more modular, user-friendly and flexible SaaS solutions means customers need to connect these disparate cloud systems somehow if they want their business to become truly data driven.

Ready to speed up your Kong Lua custom plugin development process? Before diving into this post, make sure you’re familiar with the basics of plugin development and have gone through the basics described in our Kong documentation.

Mulesoft is often considered one of the leading names in data integration. It has a wide range of features that allow companies to integrate their applications, run analytics, and automate business processes. However, before you consider Mulesoft for your company’s needs, here are some reasons why Mulesoft may not be right for you.

Today we’re excited to announce the general availability of the Snowpark API for Scala and Java UDFs on AWS. Snowpark is the developer framework for Snowflake, bringing deep, language-integrated data programmability to users in the languages they love. At its core, Snowpark is all about extensibility.

In a recently posted article on DZone, “Microservices: Good for Developers’ Mental Health,” Sauce Labs engineer, Simone Pezzano, addresses the link between developer confidence and mental health in today’s new workplace. Pezzano tells the story of his team’s bumpy start on their journey from monolith to microservices. Initially, Pezzano viewed microservices as a scary concept with rapid release cycles and shorter testing times.

Kubernetes is hard. Last year, we started the developer experience product at American Airlines. As we transitioned into the later half of 2020 and into 2021, we wanted to tackle Kubernetes app deployments. We aimed to make it easy for the users to do the right things, no matter how difficult those tasks were. Through our Kubernetes journey, we created reproducible patterns for application teams to use to make things even easier.

Speedscale is proud to announce its Centralized Log Collection capability. When diagnosing the source of problems in your API, more information is better. For most engineers, the diagnosis process usually starts with the application logs. Unfortunately, logs are usually either discarded or stored in Observability systems that engineers don’t have direct access to. Compounding this issue is that the log information is typically not correlated to what calls were made against the API.

SmartBear recently released its State of Software Quality | Code Review 2021 report. The report highlights the industry trends and findings based off a survey of close to 800 respondents from the coding industry. While many interesting discoveries were shared, we’ve narrowed down and examined the top ten insights from the 2021 report.

Today’s consumers demand digital customer experiences that are responsive, secure, scalable, and “always-on”. The pivot to digital means that activities like ordering food, booking a taxi, or even retail purchases now revolve around quickly meeting the expectations of digital audiences.

The API economy is growing rapidly. According to research by Coleman Parkes enterprises were twice as likely as their peers to be confident they are differentiating themselves by using Application Programming Interfaces. The same report showed that companies with advanced API management processes experience up to 47 percent better business results than those with basic API management.

Since its conception, DreamFactory has always consistently provided value to its customers with its on demand, custom generated API management tools, and we’re proud of how we’ve been able to support our customers.

In this episode of Kongcast, I went all-in on PHP, Laravel and PHP developer tools with Freek Van der Herten, a backend developer at Spatie. Then, Freek demoed his new PHP debugging tool: Ray. Check out the transcript and video from our conversation below, and be sure to subscribe to get email alerts for the latest new episodes.

GraphQL is a flexible, strongly-typed query language. It's useful because it gives front-end developers the ability to query the database without many changes to the back-end. In this article, David Sanchez shows us how to design and build our own GraphQL APIs in Rails.

Businesses of all sizes are increasingly relying on APIs to create competitive advantages, but many don't know the difference between API Management and API Gateways. This article will discuss what each solution does, how they can be used in conjunction with one another, and why it's essential to use both services when building an API strategy.

Like many developers and operations professionals, you may have had complicated experiences with security and certificates (encryption of the connection and authentication). Maybe so much so that you try to avoid working on them whenever possible. If you’re looking for a simpler way, Kong may be the answer. As with everything with Kong, the idea is to make things as lightweight as possible, including the complexity of setting up and maintaining certificate-based security.

There is hardly an IT application nowadays that doesn’t provide an API, which specifies how this application should interact with the rest of the IT ecosystem. So, it’s no wonder that IT staff even at large enterprises increasingly make use of APIs when they need to integrate multiple systems with each other, commonly new SaaS applications with the existing IT estate. At the same time, there are APIs and then there are APIs.

The world of insurance has been one most heavily influenced by APIs and the API-first operating model. Today, insurance agencies can benefit from learning how the API-first operating model can enable your IT team to unlock data from legacy systems and more. Technology has left its imprint on the insurance industry, and now tools like APIs have created even more opportunities for success. With so much room for success, it is important to realizes the need for insurance transformation.

Startups can be somewhat small to large scale businesses and they can vary between different fields of interest. With entrepreneurship becoming one of the hot trends of the decade, a lot of startups have shown up on the records. Many innovative ideas are converted into businesses. Some of these startups excel in large businesses whereas many meet the end of their line in a very short span of time. But this doesn’t keep entrepreneurs from capturing business opportunities.

Certain products can benefit from having real-time charts displayed within them. Whether it is an internal or external application, metrics truly come to life when they are displayed nicely. In the past, to display such graphics you would need to implement your own charting tool, map the data or metrics into the tool, and then maintain this implementation. Overall, it was a very inefficient and cumbersome way to display data visually within your applications.

One of the most important phrases of DevOps practices is “Test early, test often.” It’s crucial to perform functional testing early with unit tests and integration tests. But it’s equally important to perform non-functional testing. That means you should have performance tests. As markets become more saturated with each passing day, you no longer have the luxury to postpone performance testing until all features are developed.

TTFHW is not the most common acronym you’ll hear in the tech and product domain. Even though it’s not extremely common, it can be argued that it is one of the most important acronyms for companies trying to scoop up and deliver value to new users. TTFHW, or Time To First Hello World, is likely something you’ve already thought about. Many product-led enthusiasts refer to it as the customers’ “aha!” moment.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has millions of customers, making it one of the most popular cloud platforms in the world. With over 200 services from data centers globally — compute, storage, databases, machine learning, artificial intelligence, data lakes, analytics, Internet of Things, etc. — AWS makes it easier for businesses to move applications to the cloud and streamline workflows. Still, many gaps exist in native AWS tools, which can limit your company’s AWS capabilities.

Transforming customer experience is at the heart of digital transformation. Digital technologies are changing the game when it comes to customer interactions, with new rules and possibilities that were unimaginable only a few years ago. Customer identity and access management (CIAM) is a new field of identity and access management (IAM) that is fundamentally a component of digital customer experience.

The main objective of Customer IAM (CIAM) is to drive revenue growth by leveraging identity data to acquire and retain customers. It will build an identity-centric ecosystem to nurture an anonymous website visitor into a well-known loyal customer. We have come across multiple phases in the past, and today at the age of the customer, identity has become the glue for all contextual marketing. In doing that, in our journey towards CIAM, we face multiple challenges.

ThoughtSpot provides a rich suite of APIs for search, user controls, and platform metadata. These APIs can be especially useful for sharing data with partners via webhooks, building native mobile apps, providing results in json format for third-party charting libraries like D3, or scripting ThoughtSpot configuration to support devops and continuous integration toolchains.

The benefits of technology in the world of business are no secret. What is driving that technology today, however, is the use of APIs in areas like supply chain management. APIs are enabling the supply chain digital transformation from improved processes to forecasting and even being able to build better supply chain relationships. Being proactive versus reactive is the key to successfully managing your supply chain.

In Part 1 of this blog series, I broke down the “two generals problem” and shared how it affects IT leaders today. In this post, I will share the details of a specific battle from more modern history that exemplifies this concept.

API-first companies rely on a broad suite of services to build their APIs and generate value for their customers. Multiple teams may develop APIs using different technologies. Through processes and tools, you want those APIs to be consistent with your API consumers (whether internal or external). One tool companies employ to bring multiple APIs together is an API gateway.

As digital ecosystems become more complicated, some organizations assume that they need expensive ETL (extract, load, transform) platforms to unify data sources. While an ETL platform can offer robust features, you probably don’t need an entire system dedicated to unifying data from diverse CRMs. The right API solution can simplify your approach to real-time data unity. Plus, you don’t have to spend extra money on a high-cost platform.

“DevOps” merges Development and Operations team functions through practices and tooling, all the while making continuous improvements to applications. Teams that adopt DevOps tools, culture and practices perform better and build faster. Let’s walk through each stage of DevOps and the popular DevOps tools you may want to consider in 2022.

In the ever-changing world of business, data is becoming more important than ever before. As data earns a more prominent role in business, the way in which organizations handle their data also becomes a bigger concern. If your organization has been looking for a better way to move, transform, and interact with data, then you need to check out the cloud-based data integration solutions of Dell Boomi and Integrate.io.

The Two Generals’ Problem is a well-known thought experiment about how asynchronous – and potentially unreliable – communications can cause, shall we say, issues. These great generals from history are facing a cunning and capable enemy. Think of someone like Khalid ibn al-Walid, Napoleon, Erwin Rommel or Sun Tzu. If the generals attack together, they will win. If they attack separately, they will lose. The problem is that they are communicating over an unreliable and slow medium.

Moesif and Datadog are both platforms that provide monitoring and the ability to view metrics. At their core, though, both platforms do very different things for your organization and the teams that use them. Both can complement each other very well and contain features that can aid in making better products that scale seamlessly.

When machines need to communicate with one another and exchange data, they require certain formatting for specific data types. That's where SOAP API and REST API come into play. They allow for communication and transfer of data, but each is different in several ways. From implementation to their required resources, various attributes separate one from the other.

Talk of what to do with legacy systems often causes angst among leaders. Retiring the system means lost functionality that might be too difficult to replace. Keeping it means more time spent on maintenance rather than value-added tasks. Replacing it can be a financial and logistical nightmare. The result of these talks is often to simply keep it and make do as best as possible.

Application programming interfaces (APIs) are fast becoming the global standard for automated data exchange between and within companies. When a company first launches APIs, an adjacent step is to set up an effective system for automating API planning and implementation. But beyond that, as companies grow and expand their API use, the central challenge becomes figuring out how to best position APIs for scale as multiple, distributed teams build APIs across business units, often around the world.

Standardized a decade ago through RFC 6455, WebSocket has since matured into one of the main technologies powering the modern web. Designed to be event-driven and full-duplex, and optimized for minimum overhead and low latency, WebSockets have become a preferred choice for many organizations and developers seeking to build interactive, realtime digital experiences that provide delightful user experiences.

Boomi, previously known as Dell Boomi, is a well-known software provider for enterprise integration. It manages all the information and data that needs to flow between different companies, systems, and applications. Boomi products are designed to offer the best possible performance with the lowest possible latency. However, not everyone can afford or has room in their budget for this particular product.

In this episode of Kongcast, I spoke with Grant McKeen and Jonathan White from IntegrationWorks about how open banking and BIAN (Banking Industry Architecture Network) work with Kong Gateway to create simplicity from complexity in the banking and financial services industry. Check out the transcript and video from our conversation below, and be sure to subscribe to get email alerts for the latest new episodes.

gRPC is a remote procedure call framework that has been widely adopted among cloud native applications. It is an attractive choice for engineers needing more capabilities than what REST APIs provide. However, observability and testing tools for gRPC are few and far between. Because of this, triaging or understanding application behavior is potentially time-consuming and overly burdensome.

Many organizations that already rely on Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) to integrate applications question the necessity of an API management system. The question of which to use over often confuses. So which one is the best choice? The answer is both. Here we’ll discuss why an Integration Platform as a Service alone isn’t enough. Companies will need to embrace both iPaaS and API management to achieve the true agility and innovation they need to remain competitive.

Microservices have an entirely new set of problems due to their distributed service-oriented architecture. As a result, microservice design patterns have surfaced. This post will consider the specific design patterns that can help us build reliable, secure and traceable microservices.

Modern-day applications aim to cover a wide range of users’ needs in a flexible and scalable manner. The software development landscape is moving at a fast pace, and the competition is so fierce that a business simply can’t afford to offer a low-quality product. Thorough testing of both functional and non-functional aspects of a software application has become an essential step in the software development process. It ensures that users get the best version of your product.

Here’s a story about a developer surviving in a world of APIs, Kubernetes and rapid application modernization. Meet Josh (a pseudonym). Josh is your typical developer. He’s good at writing code in his native language, hates documentation and REALLY hates the “drag and drop” approach to developing software found in bloated API management platforms. Josh would rather write code, weave in some docs and avoid worrying about security, networking, deployment and reliability.

Many developers are interested in developing an application programming interface (API) for their startup. However, they don't know where to start and what mistakes to avoid. In this blog post, we will explore some of the most common errors made by API developers and how you can prevent them.

An organization can create revenue by monetizing its APIs. This retail digital platform strategy becomes extremely valuable when the APIs are used to build new products, create new business channels and new business models that generate income or other measurable value.

Choreo Connect is a cloud-native, open-source, and developer-centric API gateway. It provides first-class support for Kubernetes while facilitating an array of API management quality of services (QoS), such as message security, rate-limiting, observability, and message mediation. As a microgateway, it provides additional flexibility, scalability, and resilience to meet today's cloud native demands.

More often than not, securing access to your Single-Page Application (SPA) inevitably becomes an integral part of development. Asgardeo simplifies this by providing an Identity and Access Management (IAM) solution coupled with a suite of SDKs to easily integrate Asgardeo with various applications. In this article, we will explore how to use Asgardeo Auth SPA SDK to secure your SPA. If using React or Angular, Asgardeo’s React or Angular SDK can be used, further simplifying development.

In our last blog, we discussed the connectivity solution – Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) which was a preferred method for connecting monolithic applications. In this blog, we will discuss the role of an API gateway in today’s modern distributed world. We’ll also compare ESBs with API gateways and discuss how these connectivity solutions can co-exist to support both legacy and modern applications.

To harness the power of big data, more and more businesses are adopting a data-driven business model. Adopting such a model allows your company to benefit from the rich information that databases, APIs, and other modern tools provide. Have you been thinking about learning more about how to unlock and transform your data into insights with API-led data integration? This article reveals the four primary steps required to create a data-driven business.

There is simply no other industry in the world like banking. In addition to dealing with and handling large amounts of financial data, this industry also places the highest priority on security concerns and measures. For businesses using an open banking platform strategy, APIs present a safer, smarter, and better way to do banking and business. The future of banking is here, and it is the open banking platform.