Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

Kubernetes is a powerful platform that comes with many features to help engineers run their applications more efficiently. However, as you gain more experience and deploy more workloads, you’ll inevitably start looking for ways to optimize Kubernetes performance. There are many ways to approach optimization. On one hand, you could work exclusively with the tools and configurations provided by Kubernetes itself; on the other, you could reap the benefits of third-party tools.

Ever since computers started to make their way into the workplace, application development has been a priority for businesses. As a company grows, there is a need for new applications to handle new business processes and make the most of new opportunities. However, the list of custom applications requested can turn into a backlog as you hit the limits of developer resources. To ease this burden, the concept of low-code application development has entered the enterprise.

Service-oriented architecture, also known as SOA, uses discrete, reusable components that let developers take a modular approach to product design and eliminate monolithic software. SOA functionality tends to meet the needs of organizations that rely on repeat business functions. Instead of building a complete web application to fill a specific need, SOA can reuse components to speed up application development and avoid mistakes.

Most software projects leverage synthetic tests to verify functionality early on, but physical devices are the ultimate form of quality assurance. While a few smartphones may suffice early on, a growing user base means quality assurance teams must ensure support for a broad range of devices, operating systems, and browsers with public or private device clouds. Device clouds make it easier to manage devices and run automated tests from anywhere.

In this post, Nathaniel Reynolds, Associate Director of Informatics Architecture & DevOps at Moderna Therapeutics, talks about service mesh, removing limitations with open source, and how AI helps developers do more. No one can predict the future, but here’s a safe bet: in the next five to ten years, we aren’t going to have fewer applications. We’re going to have more. And that means connectivity requirements are going to get bigger and bigger over time.

APIs have become the center of software development, connecting and transferring data across systems and applications. Luckily, testing them can greatly improve the efficiency of your test strategy as a whole, helping you deliver software faster than ever. API testing is an essential part of the software development process, and it’s important to have a team that can work together to create accurate and efficient tests.

Viktor Gamov also contributed to this post. In recent decades it’s become common for communication between backend services to employ HTTP APIs with JSON payloads. Many HTTP APIs adhere (or at least aspire) to REST Principles, though many fall into a category we’ll call "REST-like".

Since our last Kong Konnect monthly update, we’ve been hard at work to deliver some more powerful features in Kong Konnect, including consumer groups, dynamic client registration using Curity and Auth0, plugin ordering, and streamlined Docker runtime instance creation. Read on to learn what’s new in Kong Konnect.

We’re excited to announce the release of Kong Mesh and Kuma 2.1! In this release, we’re shipping the full suite of new and improved policies announced (and started) in 2.0. Additionally, we’re launching some more great UX improvements in the UI and a host of smaller fixes. In order to take advantage of the latest and greatest in service mesh, we strongly suggest upgrading to Kong Mesh 2.1. Upgrading is simple through kumactl or Helm.

Testing Kubernetes Ingress resources can be tricky, and can lead to frustration when bugs pop up in production that weren’t caught during testing. This can happen for a variety of reasons, but with Ingress specifically, it often has to do with a misalignment between the data used in testing and the traffic generated in production. Tools like Postman can be a great way of generating traffic, but they have the drawback of being manually created.