We are happy to announce the first release for both Kong Mesh and Kuma in 2022, which is packed with features and improvements, including substantial performance improvements when running at scale. We strongly suggest to upgrade, in order to take advantage of the latest and greatest when it comes to service mesh.

Today, Kong Ingress Controller (KIC) 2.2 is now generally available. KIC 2.2 marks a major milestone in the development of the Kong Ingress Controller, as it is the first release containing a marquee feature, Gateway API. This represents a major milestone for Kong as we continue to keep up to date with the upstream community and provide the best customer experience for KIC customers. Gateway API is an open source project managed by the Kubernetes SIG Network community.

In applications built on a system of microservices, developers should always be on the lookout for opportunities to eliminate unnecessary use of resources, such as database queries, network hops or service requests. API gateway cache (or response caching) is an excellent place to start. For many microservices, identical requests sent within a window of time will yield identical responses. For example, consider a request to an Orders API for the list of orders submitted yesterday.

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.

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.

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.

Kong Mesh (and Kuma, the open source project upon which Kong Mesh is built) supports multiple zones and meshes. What is the difference between a zone and a mesh, though? And when should one use a zone versus a mesh or vice versa? By the time you’re done reading this blog post, you’ll have a better understanding of the role of zones and meshes and where each of them fit into a Kong Mesh deployment.

API security starts with authentication and authorization, then data security and availability. In this post, I will review security considerations for an API gateway and how the capabilities of the Kong Gateway address them. First, let’s review different aspects of API security in detail.

It’s commonly accepted now that APIs and microservices are the future of how software will be built. The introduction of application programming interfaces (APIs) first enabled development teams to expose services to the internet and provide value to their customers and partners.

In this episode of Kongcast, Jeff Taylor, senior product manager at Okta, tells and shows us how to speed up microservices security and take the burden off developers by managing auth with an API gateway.

Starting with the 2.7 release, using Cassandra as a configuration datastore for the Kong Gateway will be considered deprecated. Cassandra features will remain in Kong throughout the (currently unreleased) 3.x series, and its use will not be prohibited. However, some newly introduced functionality throughout 3.x may not be optimized for performance or have full functionality when using Cassandra.