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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.

In this blog post series, we have discussed how Kubernetes enhances a container-based microservices architecture. We examine the rise of containers and Kubernetes to understand the organizational and technical advantages of each, including a deep dive into the ways Kubernetes can improve processes for deploying, scaling and managing containerized applications. The first in the series covered Next-Generation Application Development. The second covered the Next Frontier: Container Orchestration.

From the modern application platform perspective, products should allow architects and DevOps teams to support dynamic topologies. That means a multi-platform capability is required but not sufficient. In fact, for several reasons, companies are looking for hybrid deployments to run their applications on several platforms simultaneously. Moreover, the topology should support and adjust for new and continuous architecture changes.

In February 2021, we announced the GA of Kong Konnect, the first cloud native service connectivity platform that gives organizations the flexibility of protecting their API and service traffic while simultaneously taking advantage of 10x ops improvements via the cloud control plane.

Ready to speed up your Kong Lua custom plugin development process? Before diving into this post, make sure you’re familiar with the basics of plugin development and have gone through the basics described in our Kong documentation.