Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

Today we’re honored to announce Kong has been recognized as a 2023 Customers’ Choice in the Gartner® Peer Insights™ for Full Life Cycle API Management. We believe this endorsement highlights the trust and passion Kong’s customers have for Kong’s cloud native API platform to deliver speed and scalability, unleash developer productivity, and ensure security and governance But hey — don’t take our word for it.

Creating API design guidelines is a common practice for many enterprises. The goal? Ensuring that all teams involved in API development will adhere to them. However, this goal is often not achieved, as developers may not take the time to read, study, and apply these guidelines. To address this issue, API design guidelines should be seen as the foundation to create high-level tools and services that enable developers to focus more on business logic and less on API integration boilerplate.

APIs have become the backbone of modern software development, by facilitating seamless communication between applications and systems. But building an effective API requires more than just good coding skills. It also requires careful monitoring and analysis to ensure optimal performance, security, and adoption. Additionally, creating accurate and in-depth reports can be time-consuming and complicated, especially when dealing with large data sets.

We started 2023 by closing our fiscal year and achieving hypergrowth — once again. We’ve surpassed 600 customers, increased our employee base by 22% year over year, opened our newest office in Singapore following rapid growth in the Asia Pacific region, and expanded meetups to 46 countries and more than 12,000 attendees.

In my previous post on scaling Kong deployments with and without a database, we covered the concepts of deploying Kong with and without a database, as well as using decK, distributed, and hybrid deployments. In this article, we take a tour of some of the possible Kubernetes deployments of Kong. Kubernetes (K8s) is the container orchestration war winner. While there are still deployments using other engines, we see K8s far more.

The proper management of APIs is vital for organizations seeking to optimize their digital experiences and application performance. API management solutions facilitate the efficient administration of APIs by offering several features such as access control, rate limiting, developer portals, analytics, and API versioning.

In this article, we’ll talk about the differences between an API gateway and an API proxy — as well as a reverse proxy. We’ll cover use cases and when each might be the right tool for the project at hand, including the advantages of API gateways over API proxies and reverse proxies.

API gateways and load balancers are useful tools for building modern applications. While they have some functionality overlaps, they’re distinct tools with different purposes and use cases. In this article, we’ll discuss the differences between API gateways and load balancers, give examples of their implementations, and how to choose the right tool for your web application.