At Kong, we run performance testing in CI in every commit or pull request that has a potential performance impact, as well as on each release. Thanks to the performance testing framework and its integration with Github Actions, we can easily get basic metrics like RPS and latency. Also, flame graphs to pinpoint the significant part that draws down performance. With that workflow in place, we figured one of the most significant parts of Kong’s hotpath is Nginx variable accesses.

As part of the Kong Gateway 2.6 release, we shipped a brand new jq plugin for anyone with an enterprise license to use. It’s like we combined the request and response transformer plugins to form a single, more powerful plugin—supercharging the way we work with request and response bodies. If you’re not familiar with jq, it’s a JSON processing language that allows you to manipulate any JSON document and transform it however you need.

The Neosec platform integrates with Kong Gateway Enterprise to provide automated and continuous API discovery, API risk posture alerting and API protection through behavioral analytics and response automation. And it does all that while being out of band, using the logs shipped from Kong to Neosec.

For those who aren’t familiar with Insomnia, it’s Kong’s API testing, design and debugging platform. Insomnia’s product vision is to optimize API development by simplifying and automating a developer’s workflows. APIOps plays a key role in this vision, optimizing API development by simplifying and automating developers’ workflows.

In this episode of Kongcast, I spoke with Chinmay Gaikwad, the tech evangelist at Epsagon, about distributed tracing and observability for microservices architectures. Check out the transcript and video from our conversation below, and be sure to subscribe to get email alerts for the latest new episodes.

Earlier this year, we hosted our inaugural Kong Summit Hackathon. This virtual competition engaged our open source community and offered recognition and prizes for hacks in various categories. The community delivered with ingenious plugins, hacks and documentation. In this blog post, we highlight our Insomnia plugin winner, Scott Harwell. Scott works with many hyperscalar cloud infrastructure vendors.

We are happy to announce a new major release of Kuma, and a new major release of Kong Mesh built on Kuma! Kuma 1.4 ships with 25+ new features and countless improvements, particularly when it comes to performance. As previously announced at Kong Summit 2021, Kong Mesh ships we enterprise capabilities for large scale service mesh deployments, like RBAC, and native support for Windows VMs.

Service Mesh is an infrastructure layer that has become a common architectural pattern for intra-service transparent communication. By combining Kubernetes a container orchestration framework, you can form a powerful platform for your microservices cluster, addressing the typical technical requirements that occur in highly distributed environments. A service mesh is implemented through a sidecar configuration, or proxy instance, for each service instance.