We started 2023 by closing our fiscal year and achieving hypergrowth — once again. We’ve surpassed 600 customers, increased our employee base by 22% year over year, opened our newest office in Singapore following rapid growth in the Asia Pacific region, and expanded meetups to 46 countries and more than 12,000 attendees.

In my previous post on scaling Kong deployments with and without a database, we covered the concepts of deploying Kong with and without a database, as well as using decK, distributed, and hybrid deployments. In this article, we take a tour of some of the possible Kubernetes deployments of Kong. Kubernetes (K8s) is the container orchestration war winner. While there are still deployments using other engines, we see K8s far more.

The proper management of APIs is vital for organizations seeking to optimize their digital experiences and application performance. API management solutions facilitate the efficient administration of APIs by offering several features such as access control, rate limiting, developer portals, analytics, and API versioning.

In this article, we’ll talk about the differences between an API gateway and an API proxy — as well as a reverse proxy. We’ll cover use cases and when each might be the right tool for the project at hand, including the advantages of API gateways over API proxies and reverse proxies.

API gateways and load balancers are useful tools for building modern applications. While they have some functionality overlaps, they’re distinct tools with different purposes and use cases. In this article, we’ll discuss the differences between API gateways and load balancers, give examples of their implementations, and how to choose the right tool for your web application.

I once heard someone say, “What the cloud migration strategies lack at the moment is a methodology to Lift-and-Shift connections to the cloud.” Let’s digest that. In today’s landscape, maintaining a competitive edge and delivering a high-quality customer experience is becoming synonymous with migrating to the cloud. As of 2022, 57% of organizations are migrating more workloads to the cloud.

Today we’re pleased to announce a new strategic partnership and resale agreement with Imperva. Imperva customers will now be able to directly license Kong Enterprise, the fastest, most feature-rich, and secure API management solution. In addition, Kong customers will be able to use the Imperva API Security plugin within Kong Enterprise. This allows developers to comprehensively secure their APIs and protect their business applications and data against unauthorized access.

At Kong, our mission is to deliver the best API lifecycle management experience for the cloud native era. Driven by our dedication to meeting the dynamic demands of modern end-to-end API management, we’ve introduced an array of new Kong Konnect features in April, enhancing functionality and elevating the user experience.

As we continue to push the boundaries of API management, we’re excited to announce the beta release of Kong Ingress Controller within Kong Konnect. Revealed at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2023, this new integration turns Kong Konnect into the world’s first modern unified end-to-end API management platform.

We’re excited to announce the release of Kong Mesh and Kuma 2.2. This new minor release adds some long-awaited enterprise features, more incremental improvements to our UI and policies, and many more minor features and bug fixes. In order to take advantage of the latest and greatest in service mesh, we strongly suggest upgrading to Kong Mesh 2.2. Upgrading is easy through kumactl or Helm.

At first glance, that does not make sense, right? The title suggests you should invest your DevOps/Platform team’s time in introducing a new product that most likely will: Through this article, we’ll show you that even though those initial concerns are justified, the overall benefits that can be realized by adopting a service mesh can outweigh any initial effort and investments.

As the world’s most popular API Gateway, Kong Gateway is flexible and can be adapted to various environments and deployment configurations. This flexibility means some time should be taken to make good architectural decisions for the use cases in mind. For example, the best configuration for a developer’s workstation isn’t the ideal one for a high SLA deployment. Fitness for purpose is therefore the objective.

The ability to rapidly assemble and reassemble APIs and microservices has become a competitive differentiator across all industries — allowing organizations to pivot business models and deliver amazing customer experiences at speed and scale. Innovative organizations are pushing to become agile and transforming by adopting cloud native technologies that allow them to build more resilient software quickly that easily scales.