April 2022 Summaries

Finastra is driving a transformation in the financial industry by advocating for open banking, which involves shifting from traditional closed systems to more open and interconnected frameworks. Spearheaded by Joey White, SVP of technology, the company emphasizes the importance of APIs and connectivity to facilitate digital transformation, allowing banks to collaborate effectively with fintech companies and third-party applications. This transition is crucial to maintaining customer trust and adapting to the evolving digital landscape, a shift accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Finastra's approach involves a mindset change towards delivery-focused operations, where developers are responsible for automating processes to enhance customer experiences. The company has been recognized for its advanced API management and developer portals, evidencing its success in navigating this complex landscape. With a focus on DevOps and cloud-native services, Finastra aims to optimize automation and cost efficiency, continuously delivering new features and improvements. The company's vision extends to enabling Banking as a Service, leveraging sophisticated APIs and modernized backend systems to enhance financial institutions' capabilities, with Kong's API gateway playing a pivotal role in ensuring secure and efficient connectivity.

API gateway authentication is a crucial mechanism for controlling data access through APIs, ensuring that only authorized consumers can transmit data using predefined credentials. Kong offers a variety of plugins to implement different authentication methods, such as Basic Authentication, Key Authentication, OAuth 2.0, LDAP, and OpenID Connect, each with specific use cases and configurations. These methods can be combined using logical operations like AND and OR to create sophisticated authentication processes, allowing for complex permission structures that can include multiple authentication levels and fallback options like anonymous access. This authentication framework not only safeguards against unauthorized data submissions and manages data transmission volumes but also provides a security layer for access control, crucial for both external and internal APIs. Additionally, in scenarios requiring API gateway-to-gateway communication, specific configurations like IP whitelisting and secure VPNs can be employed to ensure secure data exchanges between controlled networks.

Kong has announced the latest releases of Kong Mesh 1.7 and Kuma 1.6, introducing several enhancements aimed at improving security, stability, and integration capabilities. Kong Mesh 1.7 features a native AWS ACM integration for storing CA certificates and enables mTLS across services, alongside AWS authentication support for connecting to HashiCorp Vault, enhancing security and simplifying configuration. Additionally, it includes features from Kuma 1.6, such as support for the Kubernetes Gateway API and improvements to transparent proxying and ZoneEgress functionalities, including locality-aware routing and FaultInjection policies. Kuma 1.6 also offers a new metric for tracking configuration change propagation and various Helm chart improvements, while Kong Mesh now supports AWS ACM as a certificate provider, further strengthening its AWS integration. These updates are designed to streamline service mesh management and bolster the security and efficiency of network operations.

GraphQL is highlighted as a flexible API query language designed for streamlined data querying, particularly beneficial in scenarios with complex schemas where only specific subsets of data are needed. Unlike REST APIs, where requests might retrieve all data from a record, GraphQL allows clients to select only the data they require, exemplified by queries extracting specific fields like country names, capitals, and languages. While this flexibility benefits the client by reducing unnecessary data processing, it presents challenges for server developers, such as unpredictable performance and caching difficulties, leading to a steep learning curve. GraphQL is recommended when clients need varied data consumption methods, although it requires more backend effort. The blog series concludes that API development should be tailored to specific business needs, with microservices enabling the use of different API models like gRPC, REST, and GraphQL within the same system.

In this Kongcast episode, Henrik Blixt, Product Manager for Argo at Intuit, discusses the open-source tool Argo, which is designed for Kubernetes and is an incubating project under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Blixt elaborates on his journey in the open-source community and explains how Argo, which consists of four distinct projects—Argo CD, Argo Rollouts, Argo Workflows, and Argo Events—addresses different problems within Kubernetes environments. He highlights the tool's growing popularity, noting its adoption by a broad range of companies and its significant role in GitOps and ML Ops practices. Argo's development was spurred by Intuit's need to innovate during its cloud-native transition, and the project has since evolved with contributions from a diverse community, including a variety of vendors. Blixt emphasizes the flexibility and automation capabilities of Argo, which aid in creating efficient, repeatable, and agile workflows without sacrificing control or traceability. The episode includes a demonstration of Argo CD's UI and Argo Workflows' orchestration capabilities, showcasing their practicality in real-world applications.