If you could clone yourself, you could get your work done a lot faster, right? And that would free up time for you to pursue new projects and advance your career. It’s an idea that Kong Vice President of Products Reza Shafii discussed recently as part of Destination: Automation, a free digital event that explored ways organizations can embrace automation to make applications and underlying technology stacks more efficient, secure and resilient.

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.

Today, we are proud to announce the general availability (GA) of Kong Gateway 2.6! Kong Gateway 2.6 brings some of the most requested features by users and customers to date. Be sure to upgrade or try out a fresh install today! Kong Gateway 2.6 compatible releases will be available with Konnect, our SaaS platform, shortly! Read on for more details of the included functionality.

In the last blog, we discussed the challenges in managing APIs at scale in a Kubernetes environment. We also discussed how deploying a Kubernetes Ingress Controller or an API gateway can help you address those challenges. In this blog, we will briefly touch upon some of the similarities and differences between an API gateway and Kubernetes Ingress. We will also discuss a unique approach offered by Kong for the end-to-end lifecycle API management (APIM) in Kubernetes.

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.

As APIs and microservices evolve, the architecture used to secure these resources must also mature. Utilizing a token-based architecture to protect APIs is a robust, secure and scalable approach, and it is also much safer than API keys or basic authentication. However, token-based architecture comes in varying maturity levels, as outlined by the API Security Maturity Model.

As Kong continues to expand its global footprint, we recently added Kore Labs, experts in FinTech digital product lifecycle management solutions, to the Kong customer community in the UK. Kore built its cloud-enabled solution on top of Kong in order to revamp its architecture to scale and provide customized solutions for its clients.

One of the things that’s quite interesting about service mesh is that it has not been a very well-defined category for a very long time. Service mesh is not a means to an end. By looking at its adoption, we’ve been seeing a refocus on the end use case that service mesh allows us to enable. Some are around observability while others are around security and trust – being able to provide that identity to all of our services.

In our first episode of Kongcast, I had the pleasure of speaking with Liz Fong-Jones, principal developer advocate at Honeycomb, about the concept of error budgets for service level objectives (SLOs) and how to accelerate software delivery with observability. Check out the transcript and video from our conversation below, and be sure to subscribe to get email alerts for the latest new episodes.

Hello, Kong Nation 👋! Constructed from the combined efforts of the open source community and the core engineers at Kong, Inc., today we are very proud to release the Kong Gateway (OSS) version 2.6. Please read on for more release information.