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Like many developers and operations professionals, you may have had complicated experiences with security and certificates (encryption of the connection and authentication). Maybe so much so that you try to avoid working on them whenever possible. If you’re looking for a simpler way, Kong may be the answer. As with everything with Kong, the idea is to make things as lightweight as possible, including the complexity of setting up and maintaining certificate-based security.

In Part 1 of this blog series, I broke down the “two generals problem” and shared how it affects IT leaders today. In this post, I will share the details of a specific battle from more modern history that exemplifies this concept.

“DevOps” merges Development and Operations team functions through practices and tooling, all the while making continuous improvements to applications. Teams that adopt DevOps tools, culture and practices perform better and build faster. Let’s walk through each stage of DevOps and the popular DevOps tools you may want to consider in 2022.

The Two Generals’ Problem is a well-known thought experiment about how asynchronous – and potentially unreliable – communications can cause, shall we say, issues. These great generals from history are facing a cunning and capable enemy. Think of someone like Khalid ibn al-Walid, Napoleon, Erwin Rommel or Sun Tzu. If the generals attack together, they will win. If they attack separately, they will lose. The problem is that they are communicating over an unreliable and slow medium.

Application programming interfaces (APIs) are fast becoming the global standard for automated data exchange between and within companies. When a company first launches APIs, an adjacent step is to set up an effective system for automating API planning and implementation. But beyond that, as companies grow and expand their API use, the central challenge becomes figuring out how to best position APIs for scale as multiple, distributed teams build APIs across business units, often around the world.

In this episode of Kongcast, I spoke with Grant McKeen and Jonathan White from IntegrationWorks about how open banking and BIAN (Banking Industry Architecture Network) work with Kong Gateway to create simplicity from complexity in the banking and financial services industry. Check out the transcript and video from our conversation below, and be sure to subscribe to get email alerts for the latest new episodes.

Microservices have an entirely new set of problems due to their distributed service-oriented architecture. As a result, microservice design patterns have surfaced. This post will consider the specific design patterns that can help us build reliable, secure and traceable microservices.