February 2022 Summaries

In applications utilizing microservices, optimizing resource usage is crucial, and API gateway caching is a key strategy for achieving this. By caching identical responses to repeated requests, systems can save significant resources, as demonstrated by a scenario where an Orders API caches responses for requests made within a day. Kong Gateway, a robust API gateway designed for microservices and distributed architectures, offers functionalities like authentication, load balancing, and traffic control through its plugins, including the Proxy Cache plugin for response caching. This plugin enables Kong Gateway to act as a reverse proxy, caching responses based on configurable settings such as time-to-live (TTL). A practical demonstration involves setting up a Node.js Express API server that serves random programming quotes, with Kong Gateway managing both cached and uncached routes to showcase the efficiency of caching. The Proxy Cache plugin is configured to cache responses for a minute, significantly reducing the load on the API server by limiting the number of requests that hit the server despite multiple client requests. This approach, which involves setting up Kong Gateway with a DB-less declarative configuration, highlights the ease and effectiveness of implementing response caching to optimize microservices performance.

Kong Mesh 1.6.0 and Kuma 1.5.0 have introduced significant enhancements aimed at improving performance and usability for large-scale service mesh deployments. Key features include a new Zone Egress resource for centralized traffic management, a built-in Envoy-based gateway mode for exposing services, and a 90% reduction in memory consumption, which underscores an ongoing commitment to optimizing performance. The updates also bring a new native ECS controller for better integration with AWS, official support for Red Hat Universal Base Image, and upgraded troubleshooting tools in both the GUI and CLI. Additionally, Kong Mesh's integration with Kubernetes and VMs now supports the new Kubernetes Gateway API, providing flexible options for managing ingress and egress traffic. These improvements are designed to enhance scalability and efficiency, making Kong Mesh and Kuma more adaptable for enterprise environments.

Kong Ingress Controller (KIC) 2.2 has been released, introducing the Gateway API as a major new feature, marking a significant advancement in Kubernetes service networking. The Gateway API, managed by the Kubernetes SIG Network community, aims to replace the existing Ingress API with a more robust framework, offering resources like GatewayClass, Gateway, and HTTPRoute, which enhance traffic control through features such as true Layer 4 support and advanced routing capabilities. This release signifies a paradigm shift, allowing Kubernetes users to manage ingress traffic configurations using standard tools like kubectl, instead of relying on command-line flags or environment variables. KIC 2.2 enables detailed routing customizations for Layer 7 traffic, with future updates expected to expand its functionality further, although the API and its implementation remain in an alpha state and subject to change.

Chirag Shah has joined Kong as the new Chief Financial Officer, bringing with him a wealth of experience from his previous role at Cornerstone OnDemand, where he successfully led the company through an IPO and eventual acquisition by Clearlake Capital. Shah is excited to join Kong due to its compelling work environment and the significant market opportunities presented by the shift toward microservices architecture. With a background in finance, strategy, and corporate development, he is eager to contribute to Kong's growth and aims to build a long-term sustainable growth story for the company. Shah's career has been heavily influenced by his parents, who instilled in him ambition, drive, and the importance of relationships. He expresses a desire to work with underprivileged children if not in finance and recommends "Good to Great" by Jim Collins as a must-read for understanding successful organizational traits. Shah also values his family as his source of inspiration and finds the Google log-in API particularly useful for its convenience.

Kong's engineering department, particularly the Insomnia API design team, faces challenges in managing synchronous communication due to its international and remote nature, with team members spread across five countries and multiple time zones. The traditional model of standup meetings, which promote team cohesiveness, becomes problematic when accommodating global time differences, leading to interruptions in communication and dissatisfaction among team members. To address these issues, Kong has made standup meetings optional and implemented a flexible system that includes staggered Zoom meetings and a Slack standup channel where thorough notes and updates are shared. This approach ensures that all team members can access necessary information and participate in discussions at their convenience, enhancing communication flow and maintaining the team's international and remote working ethos.

In a Kongcast episode, Matt Stratton, a staff developer advocate at Pulumi, discusses the evolution of configuration automation and its relationship with cloud engineering and DevOps. With a background in traditional technology operations, Stratton shares his journey from being a sysadmin in Chicago to becoming involved in DevOps about eight or nine years ago, driven by an interest in automation and tools like Puppet and Chef. He describes his transition from using VB and bash scripts to adopting infrastructure as code tools, emphasizing his involvement with Chef and later Pulumi. Stratton highlights the transformative impact of infrastructure as code on work processes and expresses enthusiasm for its potential to change how people work, underscoring his commitment to the tools he believes in.

Insomnia is a versatile, lightweight open-source desktop application designed for API design, testing, and making HTTP requests, supporting REST, gRPC, and GraphQL out of the box. A notable feature of Insomnia is its ability to use plugins, which can significantly enhance its functionality, with nearly 350 plugins available for easy installation. Users can even create custom plugins if existing ones do not meet their needs. The article introduces several useful plugins, such as Faker for generating fake data, Path Parameter for managing dynamic URL values, Dotenv for integrating environment variables, JWT Creator for generating JSON Web Tokens, and theme plugins for customizing the application's appearance. Plugins utilize Insomnia's template tag system to dynamically set values at request time, offering flexibility and customization for various use cases. Users are encouraged to explore the Plugin Hub and even contribute by developing and sharing their own plugins.

Multiple teams at Kong have focused on enhancing the accessibility of their products, particularly with the Dev Portal UI, in response to customer needs and legal requirements for financial services and government institutions. By adhering to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), their efforts included improving color contrast, tab indexing, and proper heading structures to aid users with limitations. The team utilized tools like the AXE browser extension to identify and resolve accessibility issues, achieving significant progress in meeting A and AA standards. Throughout the process, they learned the importance of incorporating accessibility from the beginning of development to avoid retrofitting changes, ensuring existing users' experiences remain unaffected. These improvements not only strengthened the product but also broadened its usability for a diverse audience, emphasizing the value of mindful design in creating inclusive technology solutions.

In an API-driven economy, the ability to create fast, reliable, and secure APIs is crucial for enterprises to maintain customer satisfaction and comply with increasing regulatory requirements such as GDPR and CCPA. Kong Enterprise emerges as a superior choice over traditional API management solutions like Apigee, offering significantly lower latency and higher throughput, as evidenced by a benchmark test conducted by GigaOm. Kong's lightweight gateway and plugin-based architecture allow for flexibility in deployment across hybrid and multi-cloud environments without sacrificing performance or compliance. This flexibility is particularly beneficial for regulated industries that require precise control over data residency and security. Furthermore, Kong enables enterprises to avoid vendor lock-in, maintain data locality, and quickly establish developer portals, all contributing to a more efficient and compliant API management solution.

Kong Mesh, built on the open-source project Kuma, supports a concept of zones and meshes to structure network connectivity and logical separation in deployments. A zone represents physical connectivity where data plane proxies (DPs) can communicate within the same zone but require Zone Ingress to communicate between zones, often used to model different cloud providers, regions, or data centers. A mesh provides logical boundaries for multi-tenant deployments, ensuring isolation of connectivity through separate policies, which restricts service communication across meshes without exiting and re-entering through control mechanisms. These concepts allow for flexible deployment architectures, where multiple meshes can exist within a zone to offer isolation for teams or applications, and a single mesh can span multiple zones for logical separation, enabling platform architects to model both physical and logical requirements independently while maintaining organizational, business, or security needs.

API security is essential for ensuring that only authorized users and applications can access sensitive data, which involves authentication, authorization, data integrity, confidentiality, safety, and availability. Authentication identifies consumers, while authorization ensures that only those with proper permissions can access or manipulate data. Data integrity is maintained through techniques like digital signatures, ensuring messages are unaltered in transit, while confidentiality protects sensitive information from being intercepted using encryption and transport layer security. Safety involves validating incoming messages to prevent harmful data attacks, and availability ensures the API can handle traffic and remain operational, even under potential threats like denial of service attacks. The Kong Gateway addresses these security concerns with a variety of plugins that facilitate authentication methods, data integrity verification, and protection against potential attacks. Additionally, Kong supports API availability through plugins that manage IP restrictions, rate limiting, bot detection, and proxy caching, while providing full automation support for dynamic scaling using Kubernetes or CI/CD pipelines.

APIs and microservices are increasingly seen as the future of software development, providing flexibility and scalability for organizations transitioning from monolithic to decentralized architectures. While modern development practices enhance customer experience and drive revenue, they introduce challenges in maintaining control and visibility over dispersed API endpoints. Legacy API management tools have struggled to support these modern, cloud-native environments, necessitating more flexible solutions. Kong has emerged as a leader in this space, offering a platform that supports multi-cloud, hybrid, and Kubernetes-native architectures, and facilitates seamless service-to-service communication. Trusted by over 460 global brands, Kong's platform emphasizes speed, ease, and flexibility, enabling companies to focus on developing new functionalities rather than managing connectivity. The recent release of Kong Gateway 2.7 enhances performance with a 25% increase in throughput and introduces features like bulk policy application and expanded real-time support, furthering Kong's mission to drive digital connectivity and innovation.

In this Kongcast episode, Jeff Taylor, a senior product manager at Okta, discusses how API gateways can enhance microservices security and alleviate developers' burdens by managing authentication. He explains the transition from monolithic architectures to microservices, emphasizing the concept of an application continuum that allows gradual decomposition into microservices when code complexity and responsibility violations indicate readiness. Taylor highlights the importance of API gateways in standardizing and automating security processes, particularly through protocols like OAuth and OpenID Connect, which facilitate secure communication between services without overburdening developers. He also stresses the need for empathy towards DevOps engineers by creating standardized tools that allow easier integration and management of diverse services across different programming languages, thereby enabling efficient scaling and security adaptation.

Starting with the 2.7 release, Kong Gateway will begin phasing out support for Cassandra as a configuration datastore, with full removal planned for the 3.4 release. This decision reflects a shift towards optimizing Kong's deployment models, particularly its Postgres, Hybrid, and DB-less configurations, which align better with current and emerging use cases. Cassandra was a key component in Kong's early history, especially for distributed data centers, but the evolution of deployment models and user demands for integration with various databases have shifted priorities. The Hybrid mode introduced in Kong 2.0 offers a clear separation of control and data planes, addressing limitations found in previous models. Kong is committed to making the transition from Cassandra as smooth as possible, providing long-term support for Cassandra users through 2025 with the 2.8 LTS version of Kong Enterprise. The strategic move aims to simplify maintenance and focus on enhancing ingress gateway and service mesh solutions, adapting to new industry patterns and practices.