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.

In part 1 of this series, we started a journey from the planet-spanning infrastructure layer to what happens inside a single Kong worker, similar to an office building in complexity. In this second part, we’ll dive a bit deeper—we’ll see who the occupants of that office building are and the kind of life they live.

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.

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.