As project needs evolve and expand, people need tools or software to enhance business operations and improve productivity. Over the past few years, several frameworks have been designed to aid the development of such tools and software, and among them webhooks are prominent ones. Webhooks are essentially tools used to automate business processes and allow organizations to provide interactive capabilities to customers.

Enterprise Integration Platform as a service (EiPaaS) is commonly used to describe a suite of cloud-based tools and services that are designed to support enterprise-grade integration strategy and initiatives. The hallmarks of EiPaaS products are ease-of-use, standardization and pre-built modules such as connection endpoints (usually API-based, to connect to a business application like CRM or ERP), automation flow builder and error handler.

Before exposing your company’s APIs, your highest priority should be to assure the security, governance and reliability of those APIs. To do so, you’ll need to use an API gateway as a single secure entry point for API consumers rather than allowing direct access to APIs. Kong Gateway can help manage the full lifecycle of services and APIs as well as secure and govern the access to those APIs within an API platform.

For the modern enterprise, the focus on customer obsession—an endeavor shown by research to bring better revenue growth and customer retention—requires connectivity across all of an organization’s resources. Back in the day, the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) was the primary provider of connectivity for a service-oriented architecture (SOA).

This year, we hosted our inaugural Kong Summit Hackathon. This virtual competition engaged our open source community and offered recognition and prizes for hacks in various categories. The community delivered with ingenious plugins, hacks and documentation. This blog post highlights our Kong Gateway plugin winner, Narendra Patel. Narendra is a senior DevOps engineer at Egnyte with close to 10 years of experience as a developer, DevOps engineer, SRE and in RPA (robotics process automation).

APIs are being created faster than ever before with ever-advancing technologies such as node.js and AngularJS. With the flexibility in design and integrations for APIs, there isn't a more exciting time than now to be an API developer. However, with so many new technologies and methods of creating APIs comes the question, "What makes a good API?" While the increase in API creation has many advantages for businesses in multiple areas, there is also more room for low-quality API production.

Let’s boldly go where no one has gone before. Get ready, Star Trek fans! Jean-Luc Picard will be representing our microservice. Once we have Jean-Luc in our ship (microservice in production), what happens on day 2? We still need to add authorization, load balancing, rate limiting, etc. With an API gateway, like Kong Gateway, you don’t have to know how to do this because a set of program components, called plugins, allow you to implement this without any problem.