Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

You may be surprised to learn that more than 70% of software failures due to unaddressed functional issues that could have been caught during testing. Think about it: you release a new app or system, a user clicks their way through a common user flow…and it fails. In our competitive digital economy, we assume performance and intuitiveness—one hiccup, and users will stop using you as a provider, and possibly undermine your credibility.

API protocols evolve every few years. We have moved from SOAP to REST, then to GraphQL, gRPC, and AsyncAPI for event-driven systems. Now with the rise of large language models (LLMs) and AI agents, organizations need a new class of interfaces that allow agents to take action across real systems, not just generate text. LLMs are powerful reasoning engines, but they lack context. They cannot perform actions by themselves, see real-time data, private information, or internal systems.

Across the globe, 1.5 billion people remain unbanked, without access to even the most basic financial services. For the rest, fewer than 50% of the banked population qualify for formal credit, limiting both financial inclusion and lending growth. In an era where traditional credit models struggle to assess evolving financial behaviors, AI credit scoring is emerging as a strategic differentiator for banks and fintechs alike.

Happy holidays! 2025 has been a busy and productive time here at 'Badger HQ. While we shipped a lot of cool things, four features really stand out as we look back on the year. Our top features in 2025 include: We also attended some conferences this year! MicroConf, RailsConf, Laracon, ElixirConf, Rocky Mountain Ruby, and SF Ruby: It was great connecting with so many folks in person, discussing application monitoring, and sharing some delicious meals.

Kong was born to connect. The world is shifting from connecting cloud services with apps to connecting LLMs through agents. API calls and tokens are moving in tandem; a new unit of intelligence is forming. As AI traffic explodes into hypervolumes, speed is all that matters. The same principles of performance, security, and reliability behind Kong are essential in an agentic world. A new connectivity layer for AI is born.

Discover expanded OpenTelemetry support, full cloud-native authentication, powerful Datakit orchestrations, and PCI DSS 4.0 attestation for Kong Konnect and Cloud Gateways. As API ecosystems grow more complex, maintaining visibility and security shouldn't be a hurdle. Kong Gateway 3.13 simplifies these challenges with expanded OpenTelemetry support and more flexible orchestration. These new capabilities not only make your APIs more observable but also make it easier to implement orchestration.

Happy holidays from the Kong team! Consider this our gift to everyone who's been asked "what's the ROI on AI?" one too many times. The AI boom has a dirty secret: for most enterprises, it's bleeding money. Every LLM call, every agent invocation, every API request that powers your AI products — they all cost something. And right now, most organizations have no idea what they're spending, who's spending it, or how to control that spend. Finance teams are flying blind.

Kong AI Gateway 3.13 moves enterprises from AI experimentation to shipping production-grade agents by unlocking new capabilities focused on agentic security, developer productivity, and resilience, including MCP tool-level access control, expanded provider support, and smarter load balancing.