Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

We live in a digital economy where Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are foundational elements for businesses to operate and grow. As rightly outlined by Gartner, APIs interconnect individual systems that contain data about people, businesses and things, enable transactions, and create new products/services and business models. The popularity of APIs has grown significantly in the last decade or so, but the history of APIs stretches back much further.

In our last blog post, we traced the evolution of APIs in the cloud age. The cloud age introduced the idea of an “API economy” — or the business practice of organizations exposing their digital services or information through the controlled use of APIs. While the API economy looks attractive today, we believe it will become even stronger in the future.

When we first launched Kong Konnect Cloud last year, we provided developers and API owners a powerful way to secure and manage their API products powered by the world’s fastest API gateway. Users flocked to Konnect to reduce their operational costs by using our hosted runtime manager, service catalog, developer portal and analytics platform.

We’ve heard it called a million and one different things. Sometimes it’s “selective synchronization”, sometimes it’s called “environments”. What is clear though, is that there’s a real need to be able to manage multiple sets of configuration for Kong Gateway through a single interface. Today, we’re happy to announce Runtime Groups for Kong Konnect. Runtime Groups allow you to manage your configurations independently.

Web APIs are an integral piece of the development landscape today. According to a 2021 survey, top industries such as Digital Banking, Retail, and Financial services have experienced significant year-on-year API traffic growth with 70%, 51% and 50% increases since February 2021, respectively. The economic impact of APIs is significant and vast. Recent funding rounds of API-focused companies have seen millions of dollars go to companies precisely because APIs appeal to developers.

Today’s digital economy is shifting toward dependence on microservices — self-contained and reusable software components — working in coordination to compose the applications we use. Communication between microservices happens through the API (or application programming interface). Using APIs (which are like pieces of software that let applications communicate with each other) is how microservices expose their functionalities and allow access to their services and their data.

One of the most common use cases our customers are using Kong for is rate limiting. There are a few common reasons for doing this: For all those and more, we’re able to easily add this functionality with Kong’s rate limit advanced plugin. The plugin can be applied at different levels such as service, route, specific consumer, or even in a global scope.

Open banking initiatives have taken flight in many economies across the globe. Predicated on the open access of banking data for the overall benefit of customer choice, open banking comes with many challenges — security not the least of them. Giving customers the ability to easily switch providers of financial products goes a long way towards providing a more open and inclusive landscape of products for customers to choose from, and delivering better customer experiences.

One of the most critical requirements for an Application Modernization project is to support workloads running on multiple platforms. In fact, such projects naturally include in their transformation process migrating workloads approach using the hybrid model. Another typical technical decision that commonly comes up is the adoption of Kubernetes as the main platform for the existing services and microservices originated by the modernization project.