Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

Kuma is an open source, CNCF service mesh that supports every environment, including Kubernetes and virtual machines. In this Kuma service mesh tutorial, I will show you how easy it is to get started.

Leading customer success for developer-first or API-first businesses is quite different from traditional enterprise software. The best API products are designed to be self-serve and hands-off, meaning customers rarely need to sign into a web portal once implementation is done. If you’re a Stripe or Twilio customer, when’s the last time you signed into their web portal? Hopefully not recently, otherwise that may imply a problem or issue.

Developers, engineers, and anyone else looking to streamline development and decrease build times for integrations rely on APIs (application programming interface) to enable applications and databases to communicate. This inevitably leads to a comparison between SOAP and REST APIs, since they are two of the most common API paradigms. It can be quite difficult to understand where SOAP and REST methods are best suited, what their specific differences are and why developers prefer one method over the other.

This blog post is part three of a three-part series on how they’ve scaled their API management with Kong Gateway, the world’s most popular open source API gateway. (Here’s part 1 and part 2.) In 2019, our Kong-based API gateway platform hosted about 1,900 proxies and handled 375 million transactions per month. 2020 saw a tenfold increase in both metrics to more than 11,000 proxies and 4.5 billion transactions per month—about 150 million transactions per day.

Things don’t always go well when using an API for the first time, especially if you’re a beginner and it’s your first time integrating an API into another system. Often documentation is lacking in terms of errors, since it’s easier to anticipate things going right, than things going wrong. In HTTP, many status codes can give you an idea of what was going on when you called an API.

Developers often create many small API tools that can improve functionality, creation, tests, and management. For many organizations though, a comprehensive API management platform that consolidates many features into a single, unified solution presents an attractive alternative. If you don’t want to bother with managing a suite of small, disparate tools, you could be interested in understanding more about the following API platforms that provide an exhaustive set of features.