Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

The new Konnect Dev Portal Toolkit extension for Visual Studio Code gives you a live, portal-accurate preview of your content right beside the file you are editing. You watch a page take shape exactly as it will appear to your developers, as you type, without ever leaving your local editor.

*You wouldn't expose a REST API without a gateway. What about Kafka?* You would never expose a REST API without an API gateway in front of it. Authentication, rate limiting, observability, access control — these aren't optional extras. They're mandatory, and we've spent the last decade building the API gateway pattern to solve exactly this problem. So here's the question worth sitting with: would you expose Kafka or any event stream without a gateway?

If you've been following the agentic AI wave, you've probably noticed that the conversation tends to center on the agents themselves: which LLM to use, which orchestration framework to pick, which use cases to tackle first. But a growing body of analyst research is pointing to a different bottleneck, one that's hiding in plain sight: integration. Forrester's David Mooter argues that integration must sit at the center of your AI strategy — not as plumbing, but as a strategic capability.

Most QA teams already track the basic metrics: how many tests ran, how many passed, how much coverage exists, and how many defects turned up. Those numbers still matter, and engineering leaders will keep asking for them. The real challenge is turning those numbers into decisions, and that gets harder as AI-assisted development speeds up the volume, frequency, and complexity of software change.

FastAPI has become one of the most popular web frameworks among Python developers. It's so popular that it often overshadows the technologies it's built on. FastAPI is built on Starlette and Pydantic. Starlette handles the HTTP layer (routing, middleware, WebSockets, the ASGI plumbing) and Pydantic handles data validation. FastAPI is the layer on top that ties them together with type-driven parameter parsing, dependency injection, and automatic OpenAPI documentation.

AI is changing how software gets built. That raises the bar for every team responsible for keeping it working. SmartBear has been developing AI capabilities across the entire quality lifecycle that help teams deliver software they trust will work at AI speed and scale. Today, SmartBear announced it has achieved AWS AI Software Competency status in the Agentic AI category through the AWS Partner program.