Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

Continuous integration and continuous deployment—known colloquially as CI/CD—are essential strategies for building modern software applications. The goal of these processes is to foster a culture of continuous updates. CI is the process by which an external machine (not your local development environment) fetches your app and dependencies and then runs a test suite to ensure everything in your application builds and runs correctly.

Matt and I are out in Los Angeles this week for KubeCon 2021 this week. At the GitOpsCon event Tuesday we were excited to attend this Kubernetes session: GitOps in the Real World: Opportunities for Developer Experience Improvement

With tech constantly innovating, various tools and software need to be able to work simultaneously. API's are what makes this possible. The API provides software with a way to interact and communicate. This is how different applications connect, whether it's two internal apps or integrating an app into another company's platform. However, with APIs, as in any software integration, many challenges are likely to arise. To mitigate these challenges, an API management strategy should be in place.

An API essentially paly the role of a software intermediary that allows two applications to talk to each other. Every time you use an application like Facebook, send an instant message, or check the weather on your phone, you are using an API. The API is more than middleware however — it’s grown into an innovative business concept that can transform your business and digital strategy. When using APIs though, there are a variety of mistakes that developers can make.

Microservices are a style of architecture used by many organizations for software development. In the past, the IT industry used monolithic or service-oriented architecture (SOA) solutions as the standard. However, the lack of dynamic scalability of this type of architectural system is no longer adequate for the increasing complexity of today’s infrastructures. Microservices addresses this by providing a highly agile and scalable alternative.

The inner workings of an API gateway request can be difficult to understand because of its scale. To provide some orientation, we will use the real world as a reference, from planet-spanning infrastructure to a person eating a chocolate bar (processing a server response in a plugin). This series will divide the abstraction space of how Kong Gateway processes requests into four different layers.