Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

Today, we’re announcing that Kong has acquired OpenMeter, the open source and SaaS leader for real-time usage metering and billing. OpenMeter’s capabilities will be integrated into Kong Konnect, enabling usage-based pricing, entitlements, and invoicing for APIs, events, and AI workloads. This is a huge milestone for Kong, and we’re excited about what this means for our customers and the future of how you build and scale revenue-generating digital products for the agentic AI era.

Ever feel like you're fighting an uphill battle with your API strategy? You're building APIs faster than ever, but somehow everything feels harder. Wasn’t API-first supposed to make all this easier? Well, you're not alone. And now industry analysts are noting it as well. New Gartner research on successful API-first integration just came out, and it validates something we've been saying for a while: many organizations are fundamentally misunderstanding what API-first actually means. The result?

The healthcare industry is buzzing about FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources). Pronounced “fire,” this widely adopted data standard has been revolutionizing how healthcare information is exchanged. But building a truly modern, secure, and scalable digital health platform takes more than just a data standard. Here comes SMART on FHIR, a framework that builds on FHIR to create a universal, secure, and user-friendly way for applications to access electronic health records(EHRs).

Behind every smooth user experience is a maze of APIs quietly handling requests, responses, and data flows. This makes APIs critical connectors that enable applications to communicate and share data seamlessly. When these vital conduits fail, the consequences can be severe—system outages, data breaches, and frustrated users. API testing is the unsung hero ensuring your digital world runs smoothly and securely.

As enterprises increasingly embed AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) into their digital experiences, enforcing robust AI guardrails becomes paramount to safeguard users, protect data, manage operational costs, and comply with regulatory and ethical standards. Think of AI guardrails as essential controls: policy, technical, and operational layers carefully placed around your AI services to detect, prevent, and mitigate any unsafe, abusive, or unintended behaviors.

It’s been almost a year since we released our Konnect Terraform provider. In that time we’ve seen over 300,000 installs, have 1.7 times as many resources available, and have expanded the provider to include data sources to enable federated management of your Konnect organization. There have been many changes in the last year, but there are some changes that we’ve been holding off on as they would break your CI/CD pipelines.

If you build APIs, you’ve probably been in two kinds of conversations. One is the war room, where the team is chasing a latency spike, an outage, or a sudden drop in traffic. The other is the boardroom, where you need to show how the platform is performing, which APIs are growing, and whether your investments are paying off. Dashboards are the tool people turn to in both cases.

Picture this: you’re in the zone — debugging logic, writing endpoints, testing integrations. But suddenly you’re yanked out of flow: copy pasting cURL commands, flipping between environments, chasing down the right API keys, and juggling half a dozen tools just to make a simple change. It’s clunky and error-prone. And honestly, it’s not what you signed up for.

Technical debt is a sneaky hang-up that organizations and teams often ignore until it becomes unmanageable. It creeps in slowly, undermines your team’s productivity, and builds up until your product is hard to maintain and scale. Software systems and development cycles are increasingly being driven and supported by AI, continuous delivery, and cloud-native environments, making it critical to adopt a clear strategy for identifying and reducing technical debt.

Picture this: It's 3 AM, and your phone erupts with alerts. Within minutes, you're drowning in a tsunami of notifications—hundreds of them—while your company's critical services hang by a thread. Your monitoring dashboard looks like a Christmas tree gone wrong, every light blinking red, and you have no idea where to start. Sound familiar?