Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

Choosing the right API architecture is crucial for building efficient and scalable applications and the two prominent contenders in this arena are GraphQL and REST, each with its unique set of characteristics and benefits. Understanding the similarities and differences between these two approaches can help teams make informed decisions when designing APIs. This article aims to provide a comprehensive comparison of GraphQL and REST, highlighting their key features, advantages, and use cases.

As the need for speed in business can seemingly be at odds with the need for control, organizations developing APIs today face a critical challenge: how can you empower developers to build and deploy APIs quickly while maintaining enterprise-wide governance and security? More traditional API deployment approaches are often to blame for why API initiatives fail to deliver the promised benefits as complexity and scale increase.

When speaking with platform teams who are responsible for setting up their organizations’ API platforms, we often hear: "We really want to offload the infra side of this. We don’t want our engineers spinning up their own locally hosted infrastructure or asking other infrastructure teams to do this.

This blog addresses the common challenges organizations face with fragmented API management in Kubernetes environments and presents Kong Konnect combined with the Kong Ingress Controller (KIC) as a comprehensive solution.

Many organizations struggle with managing API gateways across multiple cloud environments. In this blog post, we'll explore how Kong Mesh can solve these challenges and enable seamless cross-cloud connectivity.

The focus of this blog is to provide step-by-step instructions for deploying and configuring Kong Mesh with Kong Konnect on an AWS ECS instance so that anyone will be able to get pre-production installation of Kong Mesh standing up on their own.

Cloud native application development relies heavily on APIs. APIs have proven themselves as a scalable and efficient way to capture, deploy, and scale functionality. Consequently, APIs became a target for malicious actors to misuse. Therefore, building quality APIs with adequate security controls is essential. Kong is the world’s most popular API gateway. Kong Konnect is a unified API platform.

In this blog post, we will explore how organizations can leverage Kong and OpenTelemetry to establish and monitor Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and manage error budgets more effectively. By tracking performance metrics and error rates against predefined thresholds, teams can prioritize their work based on the impact on user experience and business objectives. This approach helps optimize the balance between innovation and reliability.

AWS offers its own out-of-the-box API gateways. For many AWS teams, AWS API Gateways are a natural place to start when beginning their API management and API gateway journeys. However, as API practices and programs begin to scale, many organizations begin to look beyond AWS due to major limitations, feature gaps, performance issues, and cost-effectiveness challenges.

Clear, effective API documentation is a crucial and rapidly expanding component of software development. Solid documentation provides all the necessary information a developer needs to integrate with an API so that they can avoid spending hours troubleshooting and context switching. It reduces the need for additional support from other teams, encourages more users to adopt the API, and creates a seamless developer experience for overall satisfaction.