Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

There is no suprise that the applications in the mordern microservice architecture communicate by using all sorts of APIs, RESTful, GraphQL and more. API Gateways provides authentication, rate-limiting and access control between applications that expose their APIs and the consumer of the APIs are the bedrock of API infrastructure. Simple architecture which bundles API related functionality inside a single component provides load balancing, caching and ability to scale to ensure high availability.

We are pleased to announce the next release of our flagship enterprise offering, Kong Enterprise 1.5! This follow-up release adds additional stability and features on top of our last major release, Kong Enterprise 1.3, which we announced at Kong Summit 2019. Kong Enterprise 1.5 key features include Kong Immunity Consumer Alerts, OIDC improvements, and Kong Developer Portal Application Registration. There are also several smaller features and stability improvements packaged here.

As most software developers no doubt know, there are two primary models for API design: RPC and REST. Regardless of model, most modern APIs are implemented by mapping them in one way or another to the same HTTP protocol. It has also become common for RPC API designs to adopt one or two ideas from HTTP while staying within the RPC model, which has increased the range of choices that an API designer faces. This post tries to explain the choices, and give guidance on how to choose between them.

The principles behind performance testing API’s does not differ from the principles behind the performance testing of any application. Many API’s however are Asynchronous and a valid response from the API does not necessarily mean the transaction is complete which can cause a problem when measuring the performance of API’s. There are however ways around this and we will explore these in this post.