Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

February 2023

API Monetization with the Kong Developer Portal, Stripe, and Moesif

Many API developers and companies struggle to find ways to set up systems to monetize their APIs easily. Some are simple but not customizable, and some are complex and require massive engineering effort to get them all running. Join Matt as we use the Kong Developer portal to register a user in Kong, Stripe, and Moesif. The user will then be able to generate API keys to access monetized endpoints. As traffic flows into the endpoint, Moesif will record and send the usage statistics over to Stripe so that users can be charged.

Integrating Stripe with Moesif for API Monetization

Once you decide to monetize your app or APIs, the journey begins to find a simple and robust solution for billing. At Moesif, we know that a billing solution is actually really tough to implement. Getting your product from “0-to-monetization” is not always a straightforward path, even if it should be. Our no-code approach to billing is a simple and elegant way to very rapidly gain the capability to bill customers for usage. Easy monetization is the premise for our latest feature for generating revenue from your apps and APIs.

Monitoring APIs with Grafana

Now that we have explored monitoring apis with Prometheus, let’s take a look at monitoring our APIs with Grafana. You may have noticed from the previous blog that Prometheus is awesome, but takes some time to fully flesh out and their dashboards aren’t easy to read or very eye-catching. Luckily for us, Grafana specializes in data visualization. We won’t even have to configure all our Prometheus queries, so let’s get started.

On-premise Analytics WSO2 API Manager 4.1.0, WSO2 Webinar

With WSO2 API Manager 4.1, you now have two options for analytics: Choreo-based analytics in the cloud and open-source ELK-based analytics that you can deploy on-premises. Setting up either takes only minutes and you will have views and dashboards to represent standard metrics like traffic, error, latency, and extended metrics like cache hits/misses. Learn about WSO2 API Manager 4.1’s open-source, ELK-based analytics. By the end of this webinar, you’ll understand.

What's New in Kong Enterprise 3.2?

We’re happy to announce the general availability of Kong Enterprise 3.2. In this release, we’ve taken significant steps to ensure the smooth and reliable operation of our API management solution. In Kong Enterprise 3.2, we’ve delivered key functionality for customers that operate Kong Enterprise in a hybrid environment in order to further enhance its reliability. Specifically, we’ve expanded Kong Enterprise’s capabilities in the following areas.

How to Create a Kubernetes Preview Environment

A Kubernetes preview environment is an isolated environment that allows developers to test their code at any time without worrying about how others may be affected. While implementations and use cases may vary, simulating a production environment as closely as possible is the main goal. Imagine you’re part of a team developing a complex API, and you’ve been tasked with adding a new endpoint that relies on features within the codebase currently being optimized by one of your team members.

API Secrets Management: Integrating Kong Gateway with Your Favorite Identity Manager

What is Kong Secrets Management? Kong Secrets Management is a new feature that allows you to safely store and retrieve secrets used throughout the Kong Gateway deployment, improving the fundamental security of your applications. Securing your entire Kong deployment with centralized secrets makes it easier to manage and build governance around your Kong deployments.

How to Build a CRUD App in Angular With Asgardeo Authentication

In this guide, we'll be building a staff management application that can add, update, and delete records, along with authentication functionality using the angular-oauth2-oidc library and Asgardeo. This application aims to solve the identity and access management (IAM) problem and provide a secure way to manage sensitive information.

Kuma Gateway API: Your Secret Weapon for Multi-region and Universal API Connectivity | #kuma

🐻 In this episode of #kongbuilders @ViktorGamov , a principal developer advocate at kong, talks to Mike Beaumont, Software Engineer at @KongInc about deploying a mesh spanning multiple regions and using Kong Mesh’s built-in, Envoy-based Gateway for directing traffic.

APISecOps Tutorial: Delivering APIs Securely Together with Kong Konnect and Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA)

Red Hat OpenShift is the industry’s leading enterprise Kubernetes platform that runs ubiquitously across on-prem, and the cloud. With Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA), a managed Red Hat OpenShift platform that runs natively on AWS, it is even easier to get kick-started on an enterprise-ready instance of Red Hat OpenShift in the cloud. Kong similarly distinguishes itself as a multi-platform, multi-cloud API Management solution pushing the vision of APIs.

Debugging Kong Requests: 7 Kong Gateway Troubleshooting Tips

Developers will remember times when they were trying to figure out why something they were working on wasn’t behaving as expected. Hours of frustration, too much (or perhaps never enough) caffeine consumed, and sotto voce curses uttered. And then — as if by fate — the issue is narrowed down to a simple oversight that makes perfect sense upon discovery. Problem solved!

Monitoring APIs with Prometheus

Have you ever wanted a quick and easy way to monitor your Docker environment? Do you want to have an API monitor with minimal configuration? Well it looks like there has never been a better time to monitor your API as there are currently a plethora of awesome tools out there to help us with monitoring, such as Prometheus and Grafana.

Creating a Seamless Access Experience With the Digital Double

Economics in the digital world has evolved in parallel with those of the physical world — moving from a focus on products to services and, now, experiences. Joseph Pine and James Gilmore first introduced the concept in their book, “The Experience Economy.” There they observed that “getting personal with customers is the DNA of the Experience Economy.”

How To Maximize Your Current On-Premises Technology Investment

On-premises software accounted for 58% of the market share for tech deployment in 2020 and is projected to grow 30% by 2030. While cloud services will likely overtake this deployment method in the years to come, your business might not be able to afford to switch to the cloud anytime soon, especially if predictions about an impending recession come true.

API Error Codes: A Beginner's Primer

When building APIs for the first time, it is important to understand error status codes and how they impact the overall performance of the API. Error status codes are essential for ensuring that the API is functioning correctly, communicating errors and warnings to the user or system, and providing a seamless experience. It is important to understand the different types of error status codes, what they mean, and how to interpret them so that your API will function properly.

Federated API Management: Balancing Agility and Governance

Looking to develop more APIs faster (and securely)? Then you have some different API platform deployment models to consider. In this post, we’ll define and compare the siloed, centralized, and federated API platform deployment models — and dive into why federated API management is key to striking a balance between agility and governance.

Empower Developers, Wow Customers, with Kong.

Empower Developers. Wow Customers. Build delightful customer experiences and unleash developer productivity with Kong, the fastest cloud native API platform. The Future of API Management is Here APIs are the building blocks of modern applications, making up 80% of internet traffic. Take control of these connections across any environment with Kong. Kong helps you stay ahead of customer demand (and the competition) with connected, scaled, and secured applications.

Building a Mock Server from User Traffic in Kubernetes

A mock server can prove useful in many circumstances. Imagine you’re an engineer working on optimizing a feature inside of an existing API that relies on multiple other microservices to function properly. To fully test the optimizations, you’ll have to set up test versions of all the dependencies, which quickly proves to be quite a task in and of itself. This is where a mocks—a server that simulates the behavior of a real server—can be very beneficial.

APIs and Industry 4.0: Enabling the Future

The world you live in today is nothing like the world 50 years ago. In fact, thanks to rapidly changing technology, even ten years ago things were very different. Now, the world is in the middle of Industry 4.0, and APIs are essential to most business software. How are APIs and Industry 4.0 related? In this article, you’ll learn more about these APIs and API integration and how they work together.

Pros and Cons of Low-Code Development

Developers and engineers want to create great digital products faster, get them to market at record speeds, and eliminate the risks of downtime and poor user experiences. The traditional development approach often prevents this, as developers spend increasing hours meticulously coding workflows for thousands of tasks. Low-code development platforms are an increasingly popular solution for dealing with this challenge.

Integrate TypingDNA Typing Biometrics on WSO2 CIAM Suite, WSO2 Webinar

Typing biometrics looks at a user’s behavior when they type on their keyboards and analyzes patterns in their behavior. After a user's typing pattern is enrolled, the technology can passively authenticate their identity to ensure that only authorized users have access to relevant data. WSO2 customers can now enjoy an additional layer of comprehensive and robust protection against sophisticated cyber threats, all while providing a great user experience based on the innate actions of the user.

How to Maximize Product Led Growth with Customer Success Best Practices

If you want to turbocharge your Product Led Growth (PLG), it’s time to take a long, hard look at your Customer Success Management practices. The way you approach your customer success activities can make a significant difference in how fast and how seamlessly you scale.

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Kubernetes Preview Environments - Adoption, Use Cases & Implementations

No matter what application you're building and who your target customers are, everyone can agree that it's critical to avoid broken deployments. To aid in this goal, many tools and concepts have been invented, with Kubernetes preview environments being one of them. In this post, you'll get a deeper understanding of how preview environments work, how organizations are using them, and how you can get started yourself. But to put it simply: preview environments allow teams to deploy a version of their applications during the development process, interacting with it as if it was deployed in production.

How to Create Actionable Test Management Reports

Software tests are essential to prevent bugs and create robust user experiences. But building and managing these tests presents its own challenges that often fly under the radar. Fortunately, test management reports can provide visibility into test coverage and performance, making it easier to identify problem areas and ensure test suites run smoothly. This article will explore the different types of test management reports and how to make them valuable and actionable.

The International Institute of Information Technology - Hyderabad Shares Digital Innovations with Nonprofits via Choreo from WSO2

IIIT Hyderabad uses the Choreo SaaS application development suite to provide "one-stop-shop" access to digital research projects that non-profit organisations can productise for their communities.

Why Full Lifecycle API Management Needs API Testing and Monitoring

Development, application, and security leaders are increasingly embracing a full-lifecycle approach to managing internal and public API programs. While distributed teams and a growing remote workforce may build products with different toolchains and infrastructure requirements, one thing that must stay consistent is quality at speed. This means that teams need highly scalable, reliable, and integration-friendly backend API management and testing.

Optimize Kubernetes Performance Part 2: Creating Comparisons

The main idea behind Kubernetes is to create a standardized approach to running containers in the cloud. Whether you’re running AKS on Azure or EKS on Amazon, your cluster should still behave in more or less the same way. But that’s not to say you’re locked in to doing things one way; Kubernetes still offers a lot of flexibility in many cases. This is what experienced engineers take advantage of when trying to optimize Kubernetes performance.

Unlock Microservices Mastery: OpenTelemetry in Kong Gateway

Join our #KongBuilders Livestream on February 8th where Viktor Gamov (Principal Developer Advocate at Kong) will discuss OpenTelemetry in Kong Gateway! Are you tired of struggling to understand the flow of requests and responses through your microservices? Want to know the secret to identifying and troubleshoot issues quickly? Then you wouldn't want to miss our upcoming #KongBuilders livestream on using OpenTelemetry’s tracing solution with Kong Gateway!

End-to-End API Monetization with The Kong Developer Portal, Stripe, and Moesif

Many API developers and companies struggle to find ways to set up systems to monetize their APIs easily. Some are simple but not customizable, and some are complex and require massive engineering effort to get them all running. To make things easier, the Moesif platform includes Billing Meters which gives massive customizability to API monetization efforts with a minimal amount of code and engineering effort.

Architecture in the Age of APIs

We’re entering an age where many organizations are trying to increase productivity by transforming themselves into digital organizations. Digital organizations are built on top of digital architectures that unlock agility across the enterprise. Agility, which is the ability to respond to changes and new needs fast, enables most of the other advantages such as shorter times to market, better customer experiences, and competitive advantages in the long run.

Optimize Kubernetes Performance Part 1: Cluster Configurations

Kubernetes is a powerful platform that comes with many features to help engineers run their applications more efficiently. However, as you gain more experience and deploy more workloads, you’ll inevitably start looking for ways to optimize Kubernetes performance. There are many ways to approach optimization. On one hand, you could work exclusively with the tools and configurations provided by Kubernetes itself; on the other, you could reap the benefits of third-party tools.

Why Low-Code Application Development Is the Future

Ever since computers started to make their way into the workplace, application development has been a priority for businesses. As a company grows, there is a need for new applications to handle new business processes and make the most of new opportunities. However, the list of custom applications requested can turn into a backlog as you hit the limits of developer resources. To ease this burden, the concept of low-code application development has entered the enterprise.

Service-Oriented Architecture and the Modular Approach to Functionality

Service-oriented architecture, also known as SOA, uses discrete, reusable components that let developers take a modular approach to product design and eliminate monolithic software. SOA functionality tends to meet the needs of organizations that rely on repeat business functions. Instead of building a complete web application to fill a specific need, SOA can reuse components to speed up application development and avoid mistakes.

Benefits of a Public Cloud vs Private Cloud & Dedicated Devices

Most software projects leverage synthetic tests to verify functionality early on, but physical devices are the ultimate form of quality assurance. While a few smartphones may suffice early on, a growing user base means quality assurance teams must ensure support for a broad range of devices, operating systems, and browsers with public or private device clouds. Device clouds make it easier to manage devices and run automated tests from anywhere.

Moderna's Nathaniel Reynolds on Service Mesh, Open Source, and AI for Developers

In this post, Nathaniel Reynolds, Associate Director of Informatics Architecture & DevOps at Moderna Therapeutics, talks about service mesh, removing limitations with open source, and how AI helps developers do more. No one can predict the future, but here’s a safe bet: in the next five to ten years, we aren’t going to have fewer applications. We’re going to have more. And that means connectivity requirements are going to get bigger and bigger over time.

Kong Konnect Supports Consumer Groups, Plugin Ordering, and More

Since our last Kong Konnect monthly update, we’ve been hard at work to deliver some more powerful features in Kong Konnect, including consumer groups, dynamic client registration using Curity and Auth0, plugin ordering, and streamlined Docker runtime instance creation. Read on to learn what’s new in Kong Konnect.

Kong Mesh & Kuma 2.1 released with full suite of next-gen policies

We’re excited to announce the release of Kong Mesh and Kuma 2.1! In this release, we’re shipping the full suite of new and improved policies announced (and started) in 2.0. Additionally, we’re launching some more great UX improvements in the UI and a host of smaller fixes. In order to take advantage of the latest and greatest in service mesh, we strongly suggest upgrading to Kong Mesh 2.1. Upgrading is simple through kumactl or Helm.

Collaborating with Git for API Test Creation

APIs have become the center of software development, connecting and transferring data across systems and applications. Luckily, testing them can greatly improve the efficiency of your test strategy as a whole, helping you deliver software faster than ever. API testing is an essential part of the software development process, and it’s important to have a team that can work together to create accurate and efficient tests.