Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

In this episode of Kongcast, Matt Stratton, a staff developer advocate at Pulumi, explains the history of configuration automation, the world of cloud engineering and how it compares to DevOps. Check out the transcript and video from our conversation below, and be sure to subscribe to get email alerts for the latest new episodes. Viktor: So before we jump to this one, tell us a bit about yourself. Matt: I spent about two decades working in traditional technology operations. I was a sysadmin.

Insomnia is a fast and lightweight open source desktop application that doubles as a tool for API design and testing and as an API client for making HTTP requests. It has built-in support for REST Client, gRPC and GraphQL. All of that is just what you get out of the box. Many users of Insomnia aren’t aware of its secret menu: plugins. Plugins are key to enhancing your usage of Insomnia. Insomnia already boasts a library of nearly 350 plugins, and they’re quick and simple to install.

Multiple teams at Kong have been improving accessibility (also referred to as a11y) across our products. Over the past few months, our Dev Portal team has been working on accessibility improvements prompted by the needs of our customers. For example, financial services and government institutions are required by law to ensure their software meets certain accessibility standards.

We live in an API-driven economy, where Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are increasingly being used to open new revenue channels, accelerate time to market and democratize data. Enterprises are constantly striving to build faster, more reliable and easier to use APIs. They understand that every time an API is down, unresponsive or slow enterprises run the risk of losing customers, damaging company reputation and losing revenue. At the same time, API security breaches are at an all-time high.

Kong Mesh (and Kuma, the open source project upon which Kong Mesh is built) supports multiple zones and meshes. What is the difference between a zone and a mesh, though? And when should one use a zone versus a mesh or vice versa? By the time you’re done reading this blog post, you’ll have a better understanding of the role of zones and meshes and where each of them fit into a Kong Mesh deployment.

API security starts with authentication and authorization, then data security and availability. In this post, I will review security considerations for an API gateway and how the capabilities of the Kong Gateway address them. First, let’s review different aspects of API security in detail.

It’s commonly accepted now that APIs and microservices are the future of how software will be built. The introduction of application programming interfaces (APIs) first enabled development teams to expose services to the internet and provide value to their customers and partners.

In this episode of Kongcast, Jeff Taylor, senior product manager at Okta, tells and shows us how to speed up microservices security and take the burden off developers by managing auth with an API gateway.

Starting with the 2.7 release, using Cassandra as a configuration datastore for the Kong Gateway will be considered deprecated. Cassandra features will remain in Kong throughout the (currently unreleased) 3.x series, and its use will not be prohibited. However, some newly introduced functionality throughout 3.x may not be optimized for performance or have full functionality when using Cassandra.

In this blog post series, we have discussed how Kubernetes enhances a container-based microservices architecture. We examine the rise of containers and Kubernetes to understand the organizational and technical advantages of each, including a deep dive into the ways Kubernetes can improve processes for deploying, scaling and managing containerized applications. The first in the series covered Next-Generation Application Development. The second covered the Next Frontier: Container Orchestration.