Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

Every enterprise contract I’ve signed in the last two years has the same clause. “Vendor will not use Customer Data to train machine learning models.” Sometimes it’s a paragraph. Sometimes it’s a whole section. The language varies but the intent is identical: don’t feed our production data into your AI. I get it. I sign the same clause as a vendor. But here’s what’s been bothering me: that clause is a promise, not an architecture.

Each change to Kong Gateway's codebase triggers a comprehensive test suite that runs more than 17,000 * 2 = 34,000 test cases among the two primary architectures (x86 and ARM) we support. This process takes about 23.5 hours on a single machine. But we don't wait that long. A large fleet of machines runs the suite in parallel, and we shard the work aggressively so each commit finishes in a fraction of that time. That setup works well, right up until flaky tests get involved.

There is a specific kind of confidence that comes with deploying software. Not just “the tests passed” confidence, but the kind that comes from knowing the services your application depends on still behave the way you expect them to. Preserving that integrity becomes harder as systems grow, teams move faster, and AI agents become active participants in delivery workflows.

Kong and Persistent Systems partner to make migrating off old API management platforms faster and lower risk Legacy API management platforms were built for a different era. They weren't designed for microservices, multi-cloud deployments, or AI workloads. They're expensive, rigid, and hold engineering teams back. The problem is that migration has always felt hard. APIs are load-bearing infrastructure. Policies are complex. Risk is real. So the old platform stays, and the technical debt compounds.

Spring Boot version upgrades—whether moving from 2.x to 3.x, 3.x to 4.x, or even minor bumps like 3.2.5 to 3.3.1—regularly introduce subtle, breaking changes that unit and integration tests miss. JSON serialization shifts, autoconfiguration reordering, and transitive dependency conflicts can silently alter your API contract.