Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

November 2021

Metrics and Logs Are Out, Distributed Tracing Is In

In this episode of Kongcast, I spoke with Chinmay Gaikwad, the tech evangelist at Epsagon, about distributed tracing and observability for microservices architectures. Check out the transcript and video from our conversation below, and be sure to subscribe to get email alerts for the latest new episodes.

Generating Dynamic Signatures for API Authentication With Insomnia

Earlier this year, we hosted our inaugural Kong Summit Hackathon. This virtual competition engaged our open source community and offered recognition and prizes for hacks in various categories. The community delivered with ingenious plugins, hacks and documentation. In this blog post, we highlight our Insomnia plugin winner, Scott Harwell. Scott works with many hyperscalar cloud infrastructure vendors.

Kuma 1.4 and Kong Mesh 1.5 Released With RBAC, Windows Support, 2x Performance and 25+ New Features

We are happy to announce a new major release of Kuma, and a new major release of Kong Mesh built on Kuma! Kuma 1.4 ships with 25+ new features and countless improvements, particularly when it comes to performance. As previously announced at Kong Summit 2021, Kong Mesh ships we enterprise capabilities for large scale service mesh deployments, like RBAC, and native support for Windows VMs.

Metrics and Logs Are Out, Distributed Tracing Is In With Chinmay Gaikwad | Kongcast Episode 5

In this Kongcast Episode, Chinmay Gaikwad, tech evangelist at Epsagon, explains why metrics and logs aren’t sufficient for companies with a microservices architecture. Instead, Chinmay recommends leveraging distributed tracing for optimal observability.

Faster Microservice-to-Microservice encrypted communication with Kong Mesh and Intel

Service Mesh is an infrastructure layer that has become a common architectural pattern for intra-service transparent communication. By combining Kubernetes a container orchestration framework, you can form a powerful platform for your microservices cluster, addressing the typical technical requirements that occur in highly distributed environments. A service mesh is implemented through a sidecar configuration, or proxy instance, for each service instance.

The Evolution of APIs: From RPC to SOAP and XML (Part 2)

In our last blog post, we discussed the evolution of APIs from early computing to the PC era. In this post, we’ll discuss the evolution of APIs in the early internet age. Along the way, we’ll touch upon associated core technologies such as eXtensible Markup Language (XML) and discuss the introduction of web services and its common components: SOAP and WSDL.

Kong and Okta Deliver Best-in-Class Identity for API Management

As organizations look to accelerate their digital transformation initiatives, a couple of key trends are prevalent. First, there is a movement from monolithic to smaller cloud native microservices. Second, there is more pressure to innovate, resulting in an explosion of APIs and connections to secure. To help organizations address these trends, Kong is joining forces with Okta to deliver the best-in-class identity for API management.

A Cloud Native + Infrastructure as Code Love Story

We love abstractions. We want to make things easier for developers, teams and end users. In doing that, sometimes we build things a little bit too complex for those who don’t already understand the pain points for which the abstraction layers were built. Kubernetes is an example of this; it solves a very real, very painful problem, but it is notoriously difficult to wrap your head around.

Mid Atlantic Meetup | May 2021 - What can APIs and Microservices tell us about organizations?

Architects are tasked with seeing that organizations meet their objectives with speed and quality, for a reasonable cost. This simple mission is anything but simple. Security, analytics, and everything in-between present themselves as forces to be acknowledged and considered. Building APIs and Microservices present new puzzles to be solved for architects. Or do they? In this session, we attempt to detect patterns that present themselves in organizations, which have their root in human elements. Yet reliably manifest in technology.

Understanding the Basics of Envoy Configuration - Denver Meshy Mesh Meetup

Envoy is a key part of a number of service meshes currently on the market, including Istio and the Kuma CNCF Sandbox project. As such, it is often helpful to better understand how Envoy is configured to operate as a data plane in a service mesh. In this session, you’ll learn about the basics of Envoy configuration, like listeners, filters, clusters, and endpoints.

The Evolution of APIs: From RPC to SOAP and XML (Part 1)

To work and live in today’s digital world, we are unquestionably dependent on interconnected applications. These applications might be massive and highly complex, but they’re also constructed from reusable building blocks, which we call an Application Programming Interface—the API. API adoption is on the rise across all industries. However, APIs aren’t new. They came about from the natural evolution of writing computer software.

Deploying a Multi-Cloud API Gateway on AWS and GCP

After you’ve built your microservices-backed application, it’s time to deploy and connect them. Luckily, there are many cloud providers to choose from, and you can even mix and match. Many organizations, like Australia Post, are taking the mix-and-match approach, embracing a multi-cloud architecture. The microservices that make up a system no longer have to stay on a single cloud.

Hiding SOAP Legacy Applications Using the Mullet Pattern

In this episode of Kongcast, I had the pleasure of speaking with Aaron Weikle, the founder and CEO at MS3, about supporting legacy-based applications as companies add the next generation of microservices. Check out the transcript and video from our conversation below, and be sure to subscribe to get email alerts for the latest new episodes.

Hiding SOAP Legacy Applications Using the Mullet Pattern With Aaron Weikle | Kongcast Episode 4

Organizations don’t move as fast as technology. That’s why in this Kongcast episode, Aaron Weikle, Founder & CEO at MS3, explains how to continue supporting your organization’s legacy-based services as they continue to add the next generation of services. If you're planning on migrating legacy applications to microservices this episode if for you!

Demo: Zero Trust Security with Service Mesh

As the number of microservices increases and deployed across private and public networks, security is critical. Leveraging a Service Mesh guarantees the security of applications and services without burdening developers to build security, freeing them to focus on business logic and allowing organizations to meet and prove their compliance and security requirements. TIMECODES #ZeroTrust #ServiceMesh #mtls #OPA #KongMesh #KongSummit

How to Customize Your Kong Developer Portal

A developer portal is a storefront to your APIs (the products) that internal and external developers are trying to consume. The Kong Developer Portal provides a single source of truth for all developers to locate, access and consume services. With intuitive content management for documentation, streamlined developer onboarding and role-based access controls (RBAC), Kong’s Developer Portal provides a comprehensive solution for creating a unified developer experience.

Hiding SOAP in the Back With the Mullet Pattern With Aaron Weikle | Kongcast Episode 4

Organizations don’t move as fast as technology. That’s why in this Kongcast episode, Aaron Weikle, Founder & CEO at MS3, explains how to continue supporting your organization’s legacy-based services as they continue to add the next generation of services. More about MS3's Kong SOAP plugins:

Protecting Australian Consumer Data Rights (CDR) with Kong Gateway

This post highlights how you could use Kong Gateway to implement a solution for the Australian Consumer Data Standards (CDS), which is part of the Consumer Data Right legislation introduced by the Australian Government in November 2017. As detailed on the Australian ACCC website: CDR will give consumers greater access to and control over their data and will improve consumers’ ability to compare and switch between products and services.

Application Observability With Kuma Service Mesh

The more services you have running across different clouds and Kubernetes clusters, the harder it is to ensure that you have a central place to collect service mesh observability metrics. That’s one of the reasons we created Kuma, an open-source control plane for service mesh. This tutorial will show you how to set up and leverage the Traffic Metrics and Traffic Trace policies that Kuma provides out of the box.

2021 Cloud Connectivity Innovator Award Winners: Big Success, Great Advice

Many organizations have been able to accomplish impressive things using Kong products, including Kong Konnect, Kong Enterprise, Kong Gateway, Kuma and Insomnia. We recently honored four of these enterprises in the inaugural Cloud Connectivity Innovator Awards program during Kong Summit 2021.

Supercharge Kubernetes Ingress with Kong

When services are exposed outside a Kubernetes cluster, you need to take care of authentication, observability, auditing, encryption and integrations with other third-party vendors, amongst other things. In this demo, @Viktor Gamov introduces Kong Ingress Controller and how you can use it in your applications that run in a Kong Mesh-enabled Kubernetes cluster.

What's Holding Us Back From True Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Applications?

There are good reasons for spreading workloads and applications across multiple clouds. Options include using a combination of public and on-premises cloud platforms, a strategy known as hybrid cloud—or using more than one public cloud provider, a strategy known as multi-cloud. What are those benefits? And what are some of the best strategies for achieving them? Let’s explore that.

Solve These Common Kubernetes Challenges Early

Changing the technology an organization works with is a bit like taking up a new sport. Your initial excitement leads you to buy the most expensive equipment you can find, leaving you soon to realize that your new tools have created a steep learning curve. Transitioning out of monolithic applications to microservices is quite similar.