Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

By Omnia Ibrahim | Thursday, October 22, 2026 We are proud to announce the release of Apache Kafka 4.4.0. This release contains many new features and improvements. This blog post will highlight some of the more prominent ones. For a full list of changes, be sure to check the release notes. With 25 KIPs and 963 commits since 4.3.0, this release introduces many new features, improvements and bug fixes to all the components.

Kong Insomnia 13.4 is all about giving you more visibility than ever before. Whether it's your git changes, your secrets, or how your users are using Insomnia, you’re able to see more than ever before and make better decisions than ever. We’ve gotten great feedback on the native git support we shipped in v13 a few months ago, and many teams have switched to a CLI way of working. But other teams love the Insomnia Git UI.

OctoPerf 18.0.0 is out! In version 17 we separated the injection engine from JMeter, and this release is where it starts to pay off: K6 is now available as a load engine next to JMeter and Playwright. Playwright Virtual Users also measure the Core Web Vitals of every page they open. K6 scripts are code, so they usually live in Git next to the application and get reviewed like it. With OctoPerf 18 you can run them without modifying them: This is why we did all that work in OctoPerf 17.

Bots make up more than a third of internet traffic, and API endpoints attract more of it than web pages do. Scanners hunting for.env files, credential-stuffing scripts, LLM training crawlers, and the long tail of low-effort probes all hit your gateway before they ever reach a service. Every one of those requests costs you — in upstream load, in noise across your analytics, and in the bill.

New addition to LeoCore offers real-time, intent-driven orchestration that replaces manual coordination at scale.

Traditional observability was built around requests. A request comes in. A service processes it. A response goes out. You trace what happened in between. That model works well for APIs. It breaks down for AI. With agents, a single user request can trigger multiple model calls. An agent might invoke a tool, call another agent, query an MCP server, retry a model, hit a guardrail, and call another tool before finally producing a response. And all of this happens non-determinstically.

Today we're announcing Kong Operator 2.3. Building on 2.2's expansion into supporting Event Gateway and Dev Portal, this release significantly broadens our feature set. While 2.2 introduced foundational event-driven capabilities, 2.3 brings Kong **AI Gateway** fully into the Kubernetes-native fold, enabling teams to manage LLM routing and policies through familiar GitOps workflows. This update also rounds out Gateway API coverage with `TCPRoute`, `UDPRoute`, and `GRPCRoute`.

Every analyst has a version of this “Monday blues.” A leader pings asking for the quarterly forecast, wants it broken out by region, and needs it for a call in thirty minutes. The fastest way to do this? Pull the data out of your tool, paste it into Excel, and build the report there. Thirty minutes later, you've got the report: three new formula columns, a pivot view summarizing the regional split, and conditional formatting flagging the outliers.

At Insomnia, we believe your tools should support you (and your agents!), not force you into certain ways of working. Over the last few months, we’ve been hard at work streamlining our interface so that it’s easier than ever for you to get started, stay organized, and work however you want with your APIs. There are two key concepts when a developer works with an API.

*Kong API Gateway 3.16 is here: runtime log-level tuning, per-consumer plugin configs, credit/usage-based request blocking with the new Entitlement Enforcement plugin, and FIPS 140-3 compliance for regulated industries - all built for live production debugging and governance, no downtime or custom code required.*