February 2020 Summaries

API Management (APIM) and API gateways have long been central to implementing modern API technologies, evolving to encompass full lifecycle API management that includes creation, testing, documentation, and monetization. However, with the emergence of service mesh around 2017, a new pattern for service-to-service connectivity began to gain traction, focusing on improving security and observability without requiring additional code from application teams. Service mesh, marketed aggressively by cloud giants like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, complements API gateways by decentralizing network management and supporting a broader range of protocols beyond HTTP. Although both technologies overlap in service connectivity, they cater to different use cases: API gateways are ideal for offering APIs as a product and managing the API lifecycle, while service meshes provide secure, reliable connectivity across services using a decentralized sidecar deployment model. Organizations often use both API gateways and service meshes to address distinct product and service connectivity needs, exemplified by industries like finance, where different teams may develop separate products requiring both intra- and inter-application communication.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is a transformative process that replaces manual operations with automated resource provisioning, reducing errors and costs. Common tools like Chef, Puppet, and SaltStack often require existing infrastructure and can be complex to maintain. In transitioning to microservices and container orchestration, AWS leverages Terraform, cloud-init, Minimal Ubuntu, and Ansible for a streamlined IaC solution. Terraform facilitates resource provisioning within AWS, while Minimal Ubuntu offers efficient system deployment with enhanced security. Ansible, chosen for its simplicity and community support, handles configuration management without relying on a master server, using local playbooks instead. A practical implementation example includes creating a bastion host configured with Duo Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) for SSH, using Terraform to manage AWS infrastructure and Ansible to configure host roles. This approach allows for flexible, scalable, and secure infrastructure management, adaptable to various environments and requirements.

API gateways often require URL rewriting to map publicly accessible endpoints to different upstream service endpoints, such as changing a base URI from /api/oilers to /titans/api. Kong Enterprise facilitates this process by allowing users to configure routes that automatically append URI parts to upstream service paths. For more complex scenarios, such as replacing segments like /api/<function>/oilers with /titans/api/<function>, Kong supports regex capture groups to preserve parts of the URI, which can be referenced by plugins like the Request Transformer Advanced. This setup involves creating services and routes with capturing groups and configuring the Request Transformer plugin to replace and append specific URI segments. These capabilities highlight Kong's powerful API management features, which are essential for enterprises looking to streamline their API handling.