We recently sat down to discuss the language for the next Kong Gateway Plugin Development Kit (PDK). Given the number of JavaScript developers in the world and the variety of libraries and debugging tools available, there was only one logical choice. I’m excited to share that with the Kong Gateway (OSS) 2.4 release, that functionality is now available to you all!

This tutorial will walk through a common use case for the Kong Gateway Key Authentication plugin: using API key authentication to protect a route to an API server endpoint. It’s a simple use case, but it will give you the foundation to deploy and configure the plugin for your own unique project needs. Before we walk through our mini-project, let’s cover a few core concepts.

One of the most powerful capabilities provided by Kong Konnect Enterprise is the support for Hybrid deployments. In other words, it implements distributed API Gateway Clusters with multiple instances running on several environments at the same time. Moreover, Kong Enterprise provides a new topology option, named Hybrid Mode, with a total separation of the Control Plane (CP) and Data Plane (DP).

Whether you’ve made your first steps toward digital transformation or looking for ways to expand on the your current tech stack, you probably have at least one API in use. You know by now that APIs are more than pieces of code: they are products that can expand your business opportunities. They can facilitate your business’ growth with new capabilities and new revenue streams. But building and deploying APIs is only the beginning of the API lifecycle.

If you’re planning to upgrade your business technology, this almost certainly means working with an API. Either you’re building your own to integrate your on-premises technology, importing a third-party API for added functionalities, or monetizing your current capabilities. Regardless, you may find yourself working with a lot of APIs in the near future. But you may not know what to look for in searching for a high-quality API.

DreamFactory specialises in REST API generation for any number of database types however an underrepresented benefit is the ability to mount and manage any third party API via a HTTP service connector such as a Typeform REST API. This gives you the ability to generate documentation and secure an existing API as if it were created natively within DreamFactory.

We looked at service design considerations in the first part of this blog series. In this next part, I’d like to share some best practices for API versioning – a topic that comes up quite often with every customer as it is one of the key concerns when implementing API gateways. There are two ways to version RESTful APIs: URI and header-based, as summarized in this REST API tutorial.

At SmartBear we have a vision for improving the lives of developers, and adding quality into the software development supply chain – no matter where in DevOps maturity an organization sits. We’ve seen a lot of success in this effort, and no small part of it involves the way we manage our acquisitions and invest in their development teams. This is true for software solutions like Zephyr, TestComplete, and ReadyAPI, as well as our innovators behind OSS projects, like Cucumber.