Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

Happy holidays! 2025 has been a busy and productive time here at 'Badger HQ. While we shipped a lot of cool things, four features really stand out as we look back on the year. Our top features in 2025 include: We also attended some conferences this year! MicroConf, RailsConf, Laracon, ElixirConf, Rocky Mountain Ruby, and SF Ruby: It was great connecting with so many folks in person, discussing application monitoring, and sharing some delicious meals.

Kong was born to connect. The world is shifting from connecting cloud services with apps to connecting LLMs through agents. API calls and tokens are moving in tandem; a new unit of intelligence is forming. As AI traffic explodes into hypervolumes, speed is all that matters. The same principles of performance, security, and reliability behind Kong are essential in an agentic world. A new connectivity layer for AI is born.

Discover expanded OpenTelemetry support, full cloud-native authentication, powerful Datakit orchestrations, and PCI DSS 4.0 attestation for Kong Konnect and Cloud Gateways. As API ecosystems grow more complex, maintaining visibility and security shouldn't be a hurdle. Kong Gateway 3.13 simplifies these challenges with expanded OpenTelemetry support and more flexible orchestration. These new capabilities not only make your APIs more observable but also make it easier to implement orchestration.

Happy holidays from the Kong team! Consider this our gift to everyone who's been asked "what's the ROI on AI?" one too many times. The AI boom has a dirty secret: for most enterprises, it's bleeding money. Every LLM call, every agent invocation, every API request that powers your AI products — they all cost something. And right now, most organizations have no idea what they're spending, who's spending it, or how to control that spend. Finance teams are flying blind.

Kong AI Gateway 3.13 moves enterprises from AI experimentation to shipping production-grade agents by unlocking new capabilities focused on agentic security, developer productivity, and resilience, including MCP tool-level access control, expanded provider support, and smarter load balancing.

Discover how leading companies use reverse ETL to close the communication gap, unlock data trust, and turn complex data into meaningful business impact.

If your company handles customer payment information, it’s critical for you to understand PCI DSS compliance requirements. A single breach can result in substantial financial penalties and damage your brand's reputation. In my experience working with enterprise customers, I’ve seen firsthand how non-production environments often become a blind spot for compliance efforts.

Testing is changing, and AI is leading the next step Every QA team faces the same pressure: test more, deliver faster, and never miss a defect. But as projects grow and release cycles shorten, running every test in every sprint isn’t always realistic. The challenge isn’t just about automating more, it’s about deciding what to test first. That’s where AI comes in.

Every compliance team knows regulatory change is constant, but 2026 is shaping up to be a perfect storm. With SEC climate rules about to take effect, CSRD deadlines accelerating, and FASB updating requirements every few months, reporting expectations are moving faster than most infrastructures can keep up. You finalized your 10-K template in January. By March, FASB changed two requirements. Now you’re rebuilding everything again.

Talk to anyone who works with data, and you’ll hear a familiar story: Data engineers are still bogged down cleaning, prepping, and untangling semantic models. Analysts are churning out dashboard after dashboard, with little time left for real analysis. Developers are hand-coding embedded analytics, turning every new feature into a months-long project. And business users are stuck in line, waiting for answers.