Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

In this episode of Kongcast, Matt Stratton, a staff developer advocate at Pulumi, explains the history of configuration automation, the world of cloud engineering and how it compares to DevOps. Check out the transcript and video from our conversation below, and be sure to subscribe to get email alerts for the latest new episodes. Viktor: So before we jump to this one, tell us a bit about yourself. Matt: I spent about two decades working in traditional technology operations. I was a sysadmin.

API gateways are a critical component of a modern architecture. Apigee X is Google Cloud's API management platform. It also allows users of the legacy Apigee Edge product to leverage Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) products and features, like Cloud Armor and Load Balancers. With these new security and availability advantages come a new set of challenges. The biggest challenge is accessing API backends in multiple VPCs. This introduces VPC peering transitivity restrictions.

There is plenty of information on the different types of APIs, common API architectures and protocols, and such.

Insomnia is a fast and lightweight open source desktop application that doubles as a tool for API design and testing and as an API client for making HTTP requests. It has built-in support for REST Client, gRPC and GraphQL. All of that is just what you get out of the box. Many users of Insomnia aren’t aware of its secret menu: plugins. Plugins are key to enhancing your usage of Insomnia. Insomnia already boasts a library of nearly 350 plugins, and they’re quick and simple to install.

Microservice is now the architecture of choice for many developers when crafting cloud-native applications. A microservices application is a collection of loosely coupled services that communicate with each other, enhancing collaboration, maintainability, scalability, and deployment. There are several options for enabling this communication between microservices. REST is the most popular among developers, sometimes used synonymously with APIs. However, gRPC can be a better alternative to REST.

Human capital management (HCM) is a set of practices used by the human resources department for onboarding new talent. These practices focus on the needs of the organization to fulfill specific vacancies and are implemented across three main categories: hiring, managing and optimizing the workforce. HR departments rely heavily on their apps.

Multiple teams at Kong have been improving accessibility (also referred to as a11y) across our products. Over the past few months, our Dev Portal team has been working on accessibility improvements prompted by the needs of our customers. For example, financial services and government institutions are required by law to ensure their software meets certain accessibility standards.

We live in an API-driven economy, where Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are increasingly being used to open new revenue channels, accelerate time to market and democratize data. Enterprises are constantly striving to build faster, more reliable and easier to use APIs. They understand that every time an API is down, unresponsive or slow enterprises run the risk of losing customers, damaging company reputation and losing revenue. At the same time, API security breaches are at an all-time high.