August 2021 Summaries

Kong Inc. celebrated a significant year marked by hypergrowth, community expansion, and global recognition, highlighted by the technology's impact and adoption as the leading open source API gateway. The company reached over 30,000 stars on GitHub, more than 257 million downloads, and doubled its OSS community size, emphasizing the pivotal decision to focus entirely on their open source project after selling the Mashape API marketplace. Despite global challenges, Kong's team nearly doubled and was acknowledged as a Great Place to Work, while the company's revenue growth led to inclusion in Forbes' Cloud 100 and Deloitte's Technology Fast 500. With a $100 million series D funding round tripling its valuation to $1.4 billion, Kong furthered its market operations and was recognized as a Leader in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Full Lifecycle API Management. The introduction of Kong Konnect, including the Konnect Plus plan, expanded service connectivity and accessibility, especially in Europe and Asia-Pacific. The company also successfully hosted its first virtual Kong Summit and looks forward to Kong Summit 2021, reflecting the strong support from its vast community of users and enterprise customers.

Kuma 1.3 and Kong Mesh, built on Kuma, have released major updates introducing over ten new features and numerous enhancements aimed at optimizing service mesh deployments. Notable improvements include a fully automated Certificate Authority (CA) rotation in Kong Mesh when mutual TLS (mTLS) is enabled, which streamlines the lifecycle management of TLS and zero-trust operations without downtime. A new service map topology view provides visual insights into service traffic dependencies and metrics, available through a Grafana dashboard. Additionally, Kuma now supports mTLS in both "permissive" and "strict" modes, facilitating smoother migration of existing applications into the service mesh by allowing more flexible validation of data plane proxy certificates. Other updates include a "Virtual Outbound" policy for hostname and port customization, better support for intermediate CAs, and enhanced Server Name Indication (SNI) support for ExternalServices. Users are advised to review the Upgrade Guide carefully before proceeding with the upgrade to ensure a seamless transition.

Service meshes, such as those incorporating Envoy, are essential in modern microservices architectures for managing traffic, enhancing observability, and ensuring security and reliability without modifying individual applications. They consist of a control plane, which defines policies like mutual TLS and traffic routing, and data planes, which enforce these policies by managing traffic flow between workloads. Envoy, originally developed by Lyft and now part of the CNCF, serves as a high-performance data plane due to its dynamic configurability, support for multiple load balancing algorithms, and advanced protocol compatibility. This structure allows organizations to focus on application development by delegating complex network management tasks to the service mesh, with Envoy being a popular choice for many implementations, including those by Kong's Kuma and Kong Mesh.

Kong Summit 2021 is a virtual conference taking place from San Francisco, offering an engaging and interactive experience for attendees interested in microservices, service mesh, and Kubernetes. The event features presentations by industry experts, including sessions by representatives from Cargill, Vanguard, Intel, Amazon Web Services, and more, covering topics such as API management, service mesh performance, and leveraging open standards. Alongside technical insights and case studies, the summit promises to bring the essence of San Francisco to participants through local artists, musicians, and scenic views, complemented by games and prizes to encourage interaction. Despite initially planning a hybrid format, the organizers opted for a fully virtual event to ensure safety, inviting attendees to enjoy the summit from their homes while engaging with a global community.

Kong promotes architecting applications as microservices, where each service handles specific functionalities and communicates through APIs using protocols like REST, gRPC, or GraphQL. Tools such as Kubernetes and Kuma service mesh facilitate orchestration and network management. The article highlights Insomnia, an open-source API client, for testing GraphQL APIs, demonstrating how to build a GraphQL server in Node.js and use Insomnia to fetch and manipulate data. It explains the process of designing a GraphQL schema, creating queries and mutations, and connecting them to resolvers. Insomnia's features, including schema introspection, auto-complete, plugins for dynamic values, and the ability to inspect headers, enhance the testing experience. The post emphasizes Insomnia's open-source nature and its applicability to various API protocols, along with resources for further learning and community engagement.

The author's journey in DevOps began with a focus on configuration management at Juniper Networks, where they utilized Puppet to manage cloud infrastructure. This experience shaped their initial understanding of DevOps as operations-centric. Their perspective broadened during a role at Puppet, where they engaged with network automation and discovered the importance of business justification for automation beyond configuration management. A significant shift occurred at Datadog, where they immersed themselves in observability, notably Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and distributed tracing, which transformed their view of DevOps to include monitoring and data correlation across silos. This comprehensive exposure to the DevOps lifecycle has expanded their mindset, highlighting the continuous evolution and learning within the field. The author encourages others to reflect on their DevOps journeys and explore areas such as observability and API automation.

For developers who prefer to focus on coding rather than infrastructure management, AWS Lambda offers a streamlined solution for deploying and executing serverless functions, allowing them to write modular code without worrying about resource allocation. However, integrating serverless security can be complex, particularly with AWS API Gateway, but using Kong Gateway simplifies this process by acting as an intermediary for API requests. This detailed guide outlines a mini-project that involves creating a simple Node.js function, deploying it on AWS Lambda, and configuring Kong Gateway with the AWS Lambda plugin to handle secure API requests efficiently. The setup includes writing a declarative configuration file for Kong, obtaining and managing AWS IAM credentials for secure function invocation, and modifying the setup to include the AWS Lambda plugin for request handling. The guide also covers potential enhancements, such as asynchronous calls and request transformation before invocation, emphasizing the ease and flexibility Kong Gateway provides in managing serverless functions with AWS Lambda while ensuring adherence to security best practices.

A recent Kong webinar explored the role of microservices in digital transformation, featuring real-world case studies from companies like Papa John's, NexJ Systems, and Yahoo! Japan. These organizations adopted different approaches to microservices, illustrating the challenges and opportunities in digitizing operations. Digital transformation involves converting analog functions into digital forms, as exemplified by Netflix's shift from DVD shipping to streaming. Microservices enable agility by breaking monolithic applications into reusable components, although they introduce maintenance and latency challenges. Key connectivity patterns for microservices include perimeter, inter-application, and intra-application connectivity. Security is paramount, with focus areas including confidentiality, authentication, authorization, availability, and traceability. Papa John's enhanced partner interactions by prioritizing critical APIs for cloud scalability, while NexJ Systems streamlined API development through standardization and automation. Yahoo! Japan aimed to centralize its API portfolio to boost service development and deployment efficiency.

Modern applications, exemplified by organizations like Cargill, need to scale rapidly, manage extensive data, and ensure global availability, which has led to the adoption of API automation using platforms like AWS and Kong Konnect Enterprise. By applying the Twelve-Factor application development principles, developers can build scalable, resilient apps that are easily deployable and maintainable, decoupling components for seamless scaling or replacement. Kong Konnect Enterprise integrates with AWS to manage API-related tasks while leveraging AWS's infrastructure for non-API tasks, utilizing technologies like Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service for deployment. The Twelve-Factor principles guide practices such as managing codebases, declaring dependencies, using configurations, treating backing services as attached resources, and separating build, release, and run stages, all of which are essential for creating stateless, scalable, and efficiently managed applications. Kong's integration with AWS services like Amazon RDS, Amazon ElastiCache, and AWS Lambda enhances its functionality, facilitating smooth migration of services to the cloud and maintaining compatibility with legacy systems.

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and microservices are crucial to digital transformation, facilitating faster innovation, enhanced customer engagement, and improved business agility, yet they also introduce significant security challenges. The distributed nature of microservices, ephemeral containers, diverse technology stacks, and deployment across multi-cloud infrastructures complicate security efforts, necessitating evolved strategies. Kong addresses these challenges by offering comprehensive API and service connectivity and management, enabling consistent security, visibility, and data protection. A zero-trust strategy, which limits access until connections are verified as secure, is crucial for protecting data and applications. Kong simplifies zero-trust implementation with its runtime, Kong Mesh, helping teams mitigate security risks in API and microservices environments. Additional resources, such as infographics and case studies, further explore the intricacies and benefits of adopting zero-trust principles to safeguard applications from cyber threats.

Konnect features two distinct and often misunderstood components: the ServiceHub and Dev Portal, each serving different purposes within API management. The ServiceHub acts as a comprehensive repository for all services within an organization, allowing developers to discover, configure, and manage services, even those not linked to the Kong Gateway, thereby minimizing duplication and enhancing development efficiency. In contrast, the Dev Portal is designed for both internal and external consumers, providing a secure, user-friendly interface for accessing and testing APIs. It enables API providers to control visibility, manage user registrations, and offer detailed documentation, including OpenAPI specifications and interactive "Try it Out" features. Together, these tools streamline API strategy by offering a centralized system of record and a customizable platform for API interaction, thereby enhancing both internal development processes and external user engagement.