Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

At Kong, I get a chance to discuss with various organizations their plans and projects to adopt microservices and expose them with APIs. During these discussions, I’ve started to recognize some patterns that appear with regularity – patterns that have less to do with technology than with people. Technologists and engineers like myself usually do not pay too much attention to the “softer” aspects of technology implementations.

Before I met with Verifone’s executive team in London last year, candidly I didn’t know much about the company. But after learning about how the company is a global leader in payments solutions at the point of sale, with over 35 million payment terminals worldwide, now I see their logo everywhere I go!

We are happy to announce the first release in the 2.1 series of our flagship open source API gateway! Since Kong 2.0 was released in January, we have released a number of patch releases, but we have also been busy writing new features as well! This release comes packed with new functionality, ranging from updates for improved P99 latency to new features for gRPC, improvements to your favorite plugins and much more. Here are the highlights.

This past July 2 marked the end of my first year at Kong after joining with the acquisition of Insomnia – and quite a year it’s been. Prior to the acquisition, I was struggling to keep Insomnia’s momentum going as an indie. My time was spread thin, and I could no longer affect meaningful change.

In support of our partnership with AWS, we’re re-examining how some of our major customers today are using Kong with AWS. To this end, let’s look at our popular case study with Cargill. For over 150 years, Cargill has been on a mission to nourish the world in a safe, responsible and sustainable way.

Kong Enterprise provides many out-of-the-box plugins to support various access control solutions like basic authentication, key authentication, JWT, LDAP, OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, among others. Most of the time, you should be able to find a plugin to suit your needs to protect your private or public APIs using Kong Enterprise without the need of writing your own plugins.

Once upon a time, we had these giant structures where thousands of people would congregate to share ideas, pamphlets filled to the margins with buzz words and cheap, branded t-shirts. Yep, tech conferences – oh what a relic of the past that I miss. It used to be part of my job to attend these.

We are happy to announce the much-anticipated Kuma 0.6 release! This new release ships with major improvements, especially when it comes to supporting service meshes that can span across multiple clouds, multiple Kubernetes clusters and hybrid platforms (Kubernetes + VMs) in enterprise environments. Kuma has also been donated to the CNCF as a Sandbox project: the first Envoy-based service mesh to ever be donated to the foundation. Let’s unwrap these announcements.

Through a new partnership with Kong featuring native integration with Moesif, API providers will now have an enhanced Kong experience—enabling API teams to monitor their APIs and stay informed of issues and behaviors impacting their customers. With user behavior analytics, Kong customers can now track the entire customer journey with Moesif from initial sign up to the first API call and empower engineering and business teams with the product insights needed to experiment and take action.

Kong’s fast, lightweight and scalable API management solution helps improve developer productivity by automating the delivery of API management. One way Kong automates API management is through a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) process by leveraging Kong’s decK (declarative configuration for Kong) and GitHub Actions. Kong’s decK provides a command line interface (CLI) to manage Kong in a declarative way.