June 2022 Summaries

Kong Gateway Enterprise and Amazon EKS Anywhere provide a robust platform for modernizing applications by supporting hybrid and multi-cloud deployments, crucial for workloads running on multiple platforms. This integration leverages the capabilities of Kubernetes, a de facto standard for modern application development, ensuring a uniform environment for application lifecycle management across on-premises and cloud infrastructures. Amazon EKS Anywhere extends Amazon EKS technology to multiple environments, including bare metal and VMware vSphere, while Kong Gateway Enterprise enhances this flexibility with features like architectural freedom and Kubernetes-native support. In a hybrid deployment, the Kong Control Plane operates in an AWS Cloud EKS cluster, administering APIs and policies, while Kong Data Planes operate across various environments, exposing services and microservices. The communication between control and data planes uses mTLS tunnels, ensuring secure API management and telemetry data exchange. This synergy allows organizations to seamlessly manage and deploy critical applications, utilizing AWS services for authentication and log processing, while supporting API policies through Kong's plugins.

The API Innovator Awards, formerly known as the Cloud Connectivity Innovator Awards, are presented annually at the Kong Summit to celebrate innovative projects and individuals who excel in using Kong's tools to drive digital transformation and enhance connectivity across microservices architectures. The awards ceremony will be held on September 29 at the Kong Summit 2022 in San Francisco, with submissions open until August 11 for projects utilizing Kong products like Kong Enterprise, Kong Konnect, and more from the past five years. Judges evaluate submissions based on the use case, challenges faced, innovative solutions, and unique differentiators, with winners announced in early September. The Kong Summit, which is in its fifth year, is scheduled for September 27-29 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, serving as a key event for API developers and leaders.

Since its introduction in the early '90s, Adobe's PDF format has become the standard for digital documents, valued for its portability and advanced features. Initially proprietary, the PDF was standardized in 2008, leading to widespread accessibility through various software. In 2017, a feature request for the Insomnia app to support PDF viewing prompted the use of Mozilla's PDF.js, which encountered challenges including compatibility and maintenance issues. The Insomnia team later replaced PDF.js with PDFium, benefiting from its integration in Chromium, which enhanced functionality and reduced code and app size, illustrating the advantages of teamwork and re-evaluation in software development.

An API outage, defined as the unavailability of a software endpoint that facilitates communication between separate services, can range from a minor inconvenience to a major disruption, significantly impacting businesses by causing revenue loss, damaging reputation, and affecting customer retention. Common causes of API outages include server overload, hardware failures, misconfigured microservices running on containers, and inadequate network architecture, often exacerbated by a lack of redundancy and failover mechanisms. To mitigate these issues, employing robust container orchestration, implementing load balancing, and strengthening authentication and authorization measures are essential. Tools like Kong Gateway can enhance API resilience by providing an abstraction layer between clients and services, allowing for seamless service upgrades and modifications while ensuring high availability and security. The integration of plugins for canary releases, rate limiting, and request size management can further minimize the risk of disruptions. Despite these measures, a well-designed API should anticipate occasional outages and provide status codes for client error handling, with Kong Gateway offering a comprehensive solution for managing API availability and performance.

Kuma and Kong Mesh have released their latest versions, focusing on simplifying enterprise-wide mesh deployments and enhancing cross-mesh communication. Kuma 1.7.0 introduces streamlined cross-mesh communication through its Builtin Gateway, support for ARM-based environments, simplified observability and metrics collection, graceful shutdowns for data plane proxies, advanced customization for injected containers, and multiple Helm refinements. Kong Mesh 1.8.0 includes all features from Kuma 1.7.0, with additional enterprise support and SLAs, and introduces cert-manager.io support for X.509 certificate management with Kubernetes. The Builtin Gateway's new cross-mesh capability allows teams to securely expose their service meshes to each other using mTLS, simplifying the traditionally complex setup that required a Delegated Gateway for cross-mesh communication.

Git Sync in Kong Insomnia now offers enhanced collaboration capabilities for design documents through improved integration with GitHub and GitLab repositories. The recent updates utilize the OpenID Connect protocol and OAuth2, simplifying the setup for Git Sync, initially for GitHub and now extended to GitLab. Users can easily authenticate and authorize their GitLab accounts from the Kong Insomnia dashboard, enabling seamless synchronization of repositories. This streamlined process facilitates teamwork on API design, debugging, and testing across different environments, whether manually or through automation in continuous integration (CI). The team behind Kong Insomnia encourages feedback and engagement through their Slack Community or GitHub as they continue to develop new features.

Kong has announced the general availability of Kong Ingress Controller (KIC) 2.4, which introduces new features including support for TCP, UDP, and HTTP routes, and enhanced weighted load balancing capabilities, marking a significant shift in how ingress traffic is managed in Kubernetes. Building on the initial support for Kubernetes Gateway API introduced in KIC 2.2, this release further integrates advanced traffic control and resilience features by allowing multiple backend references for load balancing, which is beneficial for scenarios like canary deployments and split testing. The release also introduces the CombinedRoutes feature, which optimizes the data plane configuration by reducing the number of routes needed, though this change requires opting-in due to its disruptive nature. Additionally, KIC 2.4 enhances management capabilities with CRD categories for simplified operations and a new flag to manage CA certificates across multiple workspaces. Future plans for KIC include achieving full feature parity with the Gateway API, transitioning into beta, and launching a Gateway Operator to streamline the management and deployment of Kong Gateway and KIC instances.

A community user expressed interest in a Kong plugin for address lookup based on location search keywords, leading to the development of a Python-based solution utilizing the GeoPy library. This plugin, designed for the Kong Gateway, extracts location keywords from API request headers, uses GeoPy to determine address details, and appends latitude and longitude information to the request as headers before forwarding it upstream. The setup involves running a Python plugin server alongside Kong Gateway using Docker and Docker Compose, leveraging Kong's support for external plugins via Unix Sockets. The plugin operates mainly in the access phase of a request's life-cycle, allowing for header modifications and ensuring resilience through exception handling. Configured using Kong's declarative configuration, the plugin can be tailored to use different headers as specified by the user, demonstrating its flexibility and adaptability. Users are encouraged to explore further by accessing examples provided in the kong-python-pdk and engaging with the Kong community for support and collaboration.

APIs are essential to modern applications, constituting a large majority of global internet traffic. Kong Gateway stands out as the most widely adopted open-source API gateway, handling approximately 9 trillion requests per month, with estimates suggesting up to 11.7 trillion. Its success is driven by its core technology, which combines the efficient request management of NGINX with Kong's own advanced API management features. OpenResty further enhances Kong's capabilities by integrating LuaJIT, leading to superior performance. Kong's extensibility through a robust plugin architecture adds to its appeal, allowing users to customize functionality extensively. The platform supports various protocols and configurations, making it adaptable to diverse environments, including Kubernetes and traditional infrastructures. Kong Gateway's performance and flexibility are complemented by an enterprise platform offering additional API lifecycle management tools, making it a leader in API infrastructure.