Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

Modern technology (APIs, Microservices, Cloud Platforms, Mobile Apps) is rapidly changing and becoming a target for attackers as they continue to advance and become more sophisticated. Organizations use penetration testing (a form of ethical hacking) to identify weaknesses in their systems and address them before they can be taken advantage of.

It’s easy to create APIs very quickly. However, creating APIs that are reliable when used in challenging distributed systems is much harder. Many development teams are moving quickly to ship features to the market, which has led to the verification vs validation distinction becoming the middle ground between a successful launch and an incident that could occur from a production system.

Another year is wrapping up, and we’re taking a moment to reflect on what made 2025 a defining year for Kong. With major advances in building the AI connectivity layer and soaring enterprise adoption of agentic systems, this year sparked a hockey-stick surge in demand for the infrastructure that powers intelligent agents. Below is a rundown on the updates, the innovations, and the moments that moved the industry in one year-end recap.

Today’s software ecosystem consists of various devices, integrations, and user environments. The same application can have different behaviours in each environment, regardless if it had passed through unit, integration and system testing stages. Therefore, beta-testing is necessary. Beta testing is the bridge between an internal QA team and a company publicly launching its application.

Every digital experience we rely on – from booking cabs to transferring money — runs on dynamic, interconnected software systems. The speed at which applications are evolving is much faster than the traditional test approach can keep up with. Manual scripting breaks whenever there is a change to the user interface; automation will require regular maintenance to fix the automated scripts; and teams are continually losing confidence in the release stability.

2025 underscored a simple reality: APIs are now expected to serve both human developers and intelligent systems, and the tools supporting those APIs must evolve just as quickly. Major cloud providers (OpenAI, Google Cloud, Azure, AWS, Hugging Face, Cohere, etc.) now earn significant revenue by exposing their capabilities via APIs, which are then chained by other AI systems to build chatbots, copilots, and autonomous agents.