Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

The inner workings of an API gateway request can be difficult to understand because of its scale. To provide some orientation, we will use the real world as a reference, from planet-spanning infrastructure to a person eating a chocolate bar (processing a server response in a plugin). This series will divide the abstraction space of how Kong Gateway processes requests into four different layers.

In the last blog, we discussed the challenges in managing APIs at scale in a Kubernetes environment. We also discussed how deploying a Kubernetes Ingress Controller or an API gateway can help you address those challenges. In this blog, we will briefly touch upon some of the similarities and differences between an API gateway and Kubernetes Ingress. We will also discuss a unique approach offered by Kong for the end-to-end lifecycle API management (APIM) in Kubernetes.

As APIs and microservices evolve, the architecture used to secure these resources must also mature. Utilizing a token-based architecture to protect APIs is a robust, secure and scalable approach, and it is also much safer than API keys or basic authentication. However, token-based architecture comes in varying maturity levels, as outlined by the API Security Maturity Model.

As Kong continues to expand its global footprint, we recently added Kore Labs, experts in FinTech digital product lifecycle management solutions, to the Kong customer community in the UK. Kore built its cloud-enabled solution on top of Kong in order to revamp its architecture to scale and provide customized solutions for its clients.

One of the things that’s quite interesting about service mesh is that it has not been a very well-defined category for a very long time. Service mesh is not a means to an end. By looking at its adoption, we’ve been seeing a refocus on the end use case that service mesh allows us to enable. Some are around observability while others are around security and trust – being able to provide that identity to all of our services.

In our first episode of Kongcast, I had the pleasure of speaking with Liz Fong-Jones, principal developer advocate at Honeycomb, about the concept of error budgets for service level objectives (SLOs) and how to accelerate software delivery with observability. Check out the transcript and video from our conversation below, and be sure to subscribe to get email alerts for the latest new episodes.

Hello, Kong Nation 👋! Constructed from the combined efforts of the open source community and the core engineers at Kong, Inc., today we are very proud to release the Kong Gateway (OSS) version 2.6. Please read on for more release information.

Infrastructure as code is a core component of all modern SRE team’s day-to-day work. There are plenty of options available, but the one that I’m most excited about is Pulumi. Instead of writing a domain-specific language (DSL) to configure your infrastructure, Pulumi lets you write the language you already know. For me, that’s Typescript, but if you prefer Go, Python or DotNet programming languages, that’s an option too.

So many announcements, so many surprises and a seemingly never-ending list of impactful customer stories! After two and a half days packed with fun and learning, we bid farewell to Kong Summit for another year. If you were one of the almost 5,000 people that registered, you know exactly what we are talking about. Here is a recap of some of the most exciting parts of Kong Summit 2021.