We are in the midst of an explosion of APIs and microservices. For some, the first instinct of creating an API is to get down to building one. Some level of planning will help manage the quality of APIs when working within a team. In this series of blogs, we will be sharing some guidelines on service design while working on API projects with Kong. Let us start by focusing on how to go about designing APIs that end up as entities that the Kong API Gateway runtime understands.

API Observability is a key component to properly execute APIOps Cycles and ensure your building something of value for your API users. If you’re not familiar with APIOps Cycles, take a look at this guide which provides an agile framework to quickly build APIs that are business-oriented and serve customer needs. API Observability itself is an evolution of traditional monitoring and born out of control systems theory.

As engineers, we continuously aim for perfection. The drive to deliver the perfect product sometimes defines how good we are as engineers. We often discuss and fine tune the term and the essence of our product’s perfection. Some claim that a perfect product is one that handles all the edge cases, works flawlessly, and can do everything.

We are excited to announce N|Solid v4.3.0, which delivers Import/Export functionality allowing users to easily match configuration settings across and covers the security patch to coincide with Node.js v15.2.1, v14.15.1, and v12.19.1. N|Solid Console users can now export configuration settings using either NSolid Console or the CLI, the result is a JSON format file which can be used to import settings across different setups.

This autumn launch for Tideways includes new features and improvements that we worked on the last three months. These are (in no particular order): Aside from this blog post explaining the new features in detail and the documentation, we also invite you to sign up for our 30 minute webinar "New Features and Improvements launched in autumn 2020" scheduled for 25th November 2020, 15:00 Europe/Berlin.

November 15-21 marks International Fraud Awareness Week – but for many in government, that’s every week. From bogus benefits claims to fraudulent network activity, fraud in all its forms represents a significant threat to government at all levels. Some experts estimate the U.S. government loses nearly 150 billion dollars due to potential fraud each year, McKinsey & Company reports.

Testing is a critical step if you want to ensure quality in your products. It’s crucial to test your applications to make sure they work properly – otherwise, customers are less likely to buy or continue to use them. While important, software testing can be a repetitive process that takes time and resources you’d probably rather use for tasks that deliver innovation to the functionality or performance. This is where test automation comes in.

Over the course of just a few years, the ways in which we consume content have changed dramatically. In order to compete in this new landscape and to adapt to the technological change that underpins it, media studios and other content producers should consider providing relatively open access to their proprietary content. This necessitates a cultural change across the industry.

Two of the most useful tools for making software development run smoothly are CI & CD. Over the years our stack has evolved from a humble Jenkins box into a cloud-native platform. In this post, we’ll share our learnings from this journey.

React Hooks is a new addition to React which enables you to use state and other features of the library without having to create a class. By ‘hooking into’ React’s existing features, you can significantly reduce the number of concepts you have to grapple with, and you can create custom hooks to share all kinds of non-visual logic, making your code much more reusable.