Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

Many organizations struggle with managing API gateways across multiple cloud environments. In this blog post, we'll explore how Kong Mesh can solve these challenges and enable seamless cross-cloud connectivity.

The focus of this blog is to provide step-by-step instructions for deploying and configuring Kong Mesh with Kong Konnect on an AWS ECS instance so that anyone will be able to get pre-production installation of Kong Mesh standing up on their own.

In this blog post, we will explore how organizations can leverage Kong and OpenTelemetry to establish and monitor Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and manage error budgets more effectively. By tracking performance metrics and error rates against predefined thresholds, teams can prioritize their work based on the impact on user experience and business objectives. This approach helps optimize the balance between innovation and reliability.

Cloud native application development relies heavily on APIs. APIs have proven themselves as a scalable and efficient way to capture, deploy, and scale functionality. Consequently, APIs became a target for malicious actors to misuse. Therefore, building quality APIs with adequate security controls is essential. Kong is the world’s most popular API gateway. Kong Konnect is a unified API platform.

AWS offers its own out-of-the-box API gateways. For many AWS teams, AWS API Gateways are a natural place to start when beginning their API management and API gateway journeys. However, as API practices and programs begin to scale, many organizations begin to look beyond AWS due to major limitations, feature gaps, performance issues, and cost-effectiveness challenges.

Clear, effective API documentation is a crucial and rapidly expanding component of software development. Solid documentation provides all the necessary information a developer needs to integrate with an API so that they can avoid spending hours troubleshooting and context switching. It reduces the need for additional support from other teams, encourages more users to adopt the API, and creates a seamless developer experience for overall satisfaction.

As AI technologies continue to revolutionize industries, organizations must balance innovation with responsibility. Kong understands that embracing AI involves not just adopting new tools but also ensuring they're secure, compliant, and sustainable. During a recent visit to Singapore, Kong's Co-Founder and CTO Marco Palladino highlighted the critical need for a robust governance framework to manage the rapid pace of AI innovation responsibly.

Ensuring secure access to applications and APIs is critical. As organizations increasingly adopt microservices architectures and cloud native solutions, the need for robust, fine-grained access control mechanisms becomes paramount. This is where the combination of Open Policy Agent (OPA) and Kong Gateway shines.

APIs facilitate effortless communication and data exchange between applications and services. However, their inherent design, which codifies service capabilities within the API definition, makes them easily exploitable by malicious actors. API attacks in the US alone are projected to cost $506 billion this decade — and are expected to surge 996% by 2030. And API-related breaches lead to more leaked data than the average security breach, according to Gartner.

Today we're excited to announce Kong Gateway 3.9! Since unveiling Kong Gateway 3.8 at API Summit 2024 just a few months ago, we’ve been busy making important updates and improvements to Kong Gateway. This release introduces new functionality around LLM support for AI governance and security and threat protection. Keep reading to learn more!