Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

As more companies are undergoing digital transformation (resulting in a huge explosion of APIs and microservices), it’s of paramount importance to get all the necessary data points and feedback to provide the best experience for both users and developers. Kong Gateway is a lightweight API gateway that is built to be open and versatile. Regardless of the technology stack involved, Kong supports these monitoring or logging requirements through its extensive ecosystem of plugins.

As engineers and architects, we automatically build resilience into platforms as far as possible. But what about the unknown failures? What about the unknown behavior of your platform? The philosopher, Socrates, once said “You don’t know what you don’t know”. What if I could tell you there is a way to turn these unknowns into knowns – a way to understand how your platform will behave to specific failure events…

We live in a digital economy where Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are foundational elements for businesses to operate and grow. As rightly outlined by Gartner, APIs interconnect individual systems that contain data about people, businesses and things, enable transactions, and create new products/services and business models. The popularity of APIs has grown significantly in the last decade or so, but the history of APIs stretches back much further.

In our last blog post, we traced the evolution of APIs in the cloud age. The cloud age introduced the idea of an “API economy” — or the business practice of organizations exposing their digital services or information through the controlled use of APIs. While the API economy looks attractive today, we believe it will become even stronger in the future.

When we first launched Kong Konnect Cloud last year, we provided developers and API owners a powerful way to secure and manage their API products powered by the world’s fastest API gateway. Users flocked to Konnect to reduce their operational costs by using our hosted runtime manager, service catalog, developer portal and analytics platform.

We’ve heard it called a million and one different things. Sometimes it’s “selective synchronization”, sometimes it’s called “environments”. What is clear though, is that there’s a real need to be able to manage multiple sets of configuration for Kong Gateway through a single interface. Today, we’re happy to announce Runtime Groups for Kong Konnect. Runtime Groups allow you to manage your configurations independently.

Today’s digital economy is shifting toward dependence on microservices — self-contained and reusable software components — working in coordination to compose the applications we use. Communication between microservices happens through the API (or application programming interface). Using APIs (which are like pieces of software that let applications communicate with each other) is how microservices expose their functionalities and allow access to their services and their data.

Web APIs are an integral piece of the development landscape today. According to a 2021 survey, top industries such as Digital Banking, Retail, and Financial services have experienced significant year-on-year API traffic growth with 70%, 51% and 50% increases since February 2021, respectively. The economic impact of APIs is significant and vast. Recent funding rounds of API-focused companies have seen millions of dollars go to companies precisely because APIs appeal to developers.

One of the most common use cases our customers are using Kong for is rate limiting. There are a few common reasons for doing this: For all those and more, we’re able to easily add this functionality with Kong’s rate limit advanced plugin. The plugin can be applied at different levels such as service, route, specific consumer, or even in a global scope.