API Summit 2023 is a wrap! Over the two-day conference (our sixth-annual event), we packed in over 40 hours of content in 100 sessions touching on everything from ensuring reliable connectivity to generative AI. We heard from investors about the future of APIs, as well as stories from users and customers from all over the world. And, of course, we also had plenty of Kong-related news to share. Here are some of the highlights from the event and a round-up of all the Kong news dropped this week.

We’re excited to announce Kong's unified API lifecycle management platform. Kong Konnect, our cloud API platform, can now manage services from API gateway, Ingress, and service mesh with a hosted control plane that can be implemented across any cloud provider, Kubernetes distribution, or on-premises data centers.

Today at API Summit 2023, we’re launching a revolutionary update to Kong Konnect SaaS that brings together many of the innovations we’ve been developing this last year. This latest version of Kong Konnect is dedicated to visionary and pragmatic developers and customers who are working hard to make their organizations leaders in an API-first world. For the first time ever, the Kong Konnect unified API platform can now bring together all API runtimes under one, single cloud management plane.

The growth of APIs continues to drive our digital economy, and API management underpins the success of every modern application and the businesses that depend on their success. Today, we are very excited to announce the release of an essential guide to building and managing next-generation API platforms with GraphQL. Kong and Apollo, as leaders in the respective areas of API management and GraphQL, have partnered to author a thorough technical examination of next-generation API platforms.

GraphQL is a query language to enable applications to fetch data from servers. In fact, as it isn't tied to any specific database or storage engine, GraphQL can aggregate data from multiple sources to create a natural representation of your data. The representation is a graph. The following image illustrates a typical GraphQL abstraction: A few common GraphQL use cases include.

The Kong and Amazon (AWS) partnership is stronger than ever! As Kong continues to evolve, with Kong Konnect and Kong Mesh, the means of integrating with AWS grows as well. In a continuous effort to offer cutting-edge collaborations, Kong announces new Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) based contributions: Kong Konnect AddOns for the EKS Blueprints for Terraform framework and two new Kong AWS workshops.

Domain-driven designs are popular in organizations that have complex domain models and wish to organize engineering around them. REST-based architectures are a common choice for implementing the API entry point into these domains. REST-based solutions are straightforward for the API builder and for API consumers concerned with data from a single API. But what about developers tasked with aggregating information across domains?

In the ever-evolving landscape of digital business operations, staying ahead of the curve requires constant adaptation and innovation. Kong Mesh 2.4 contains several enhancements to help your organization’s infrastructure be more efficient. In this blog post, we’ll explore the key benefits of Kong Mesh 2.4 across three critical domains: security, resilience, and flexibility.

Few things are more frustrating than encountering a product with either no documentation or worse: documentation that leads you astray. When it comes to developing APIs, schemas typically define how requests and responses are formatted and guide how clients and services exchange data. Commonly, schemas aren’t used to generate documentation or software development kits (SDKs), allowing them to become stale and inaccurate.

With our AWS partnership, we jointly created two Kong Konnect AWS EKS Terraform Blueprints AddOns — eks-blueprint-konnect-runtime-instance and eks-blueprint-konnect-kic — to help bootstrap your Kong Konnect instances on EKS. In this post, we’ll discuss what AWS EKS Blueprints AddOns for Terraform are and their benefits, plus we’ll demo the Kong Konnect AddOns we’ve built out.

While JSON-based APIs are ubiquitous in the API-centric world of today, many industries adapted internet-based protocols for automated information exchange way before REST and JSON became popular. One attempt to establish a standardized protocol suite for automated data interchange within and between enterprises was SOAP, originally an acronym for Simple Object Access Protocol.