Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

Whether you’ve made your first steps toward digital transformation or looking for ways to expand on the your current tech stack, you probably have at least one API in use. You know by now that APIs are more than pieces of code: they are products that can expand your business opportunities. They can facilitate your business’ growth with new capabilities and new revenue streams. But building and deploying APIs is only the beginning of the API lifecycle.

If you’re planning to upgrade your business technology, this almost certainly means working with an API. Either you’re building your own to integrate your on-premises technology, importing a third-party API for added functionalities, or monetizing your current capabilities. Regardless, you may find yourself working with a lot of APIs in the near future. But you may not know what to look for in searching for a high-quality API.

We looked at service design considerations in the first part of this blog series. In this next part, I’d like to share some best practices for API versioning – a topic that comes up quite often with every customer as it is one of the key concerns when implementing API gateways. There are two ways to version RESTful APIs: URI and header-based, as summarized in this REST API tutorial.

At SmartBear we have a vision for improving the lives of developers, and adding quality into the software development supply chain – no matter where in DevOps maturity an organization sits. We’ve seen a lot of success in this effort, and no small part of it involves the way we manage our acquisitions and invest in their development teams. This is true for software solutions like Zephyr, TestComplete, and ReadyAPI, as well as our innovators behind OSS projects, like Cucumber.

APIs are the backbone of digital transformation. Via APIs, you can securely share data and functionality with developers both inside and outside of your organizational boundaries, letting you build applications faster, seamlessly connect and interact with partners, and drive new business revenue. Because APIs encompass business-critical information, any downtime or performance degradation can lead to significant loss in revenue, customers, and brand value.

This morning we released DreamFactory 4.7.0 with a bunch of new features and bug fixes!

Containerization and orchestration are becoming increasingly popular. According to a recent survey conducted by Market Watch, the global container market will exceed $5 billion by 2026. In 2019, that number was under 1 billion. These statistics show that the world is moving more towards containers and orchestration faster and faster each day. One example of this is moving from VM to Kubernetes.

As many organizations push forward in adopting cloud-first strategies, issues often arise with addressing how their suite of applications and systems can remain integrated securely and efficiently. Whilst the movement to the cloud was a huge step in technological advancement, advancements in API technology now make “hybrid cloud” models possible, and businesses exist both in the cloud and on premises.

Note to readers before we get started: you’ll see us referring to the “Kong Gateway” in this post. This is the product previously referred to as Kong Gateway Enterprise. In version 2.3, we released a free operating mode of Kong Gateway Enterprise, and given it no longer needs a paid “Enterprise” license, we now refer to this gateway as the Kong Gateway and disambiguate from the OSS-only Gateway as Kong Gateway (OSS).