September 2023 Summaries

API Summit 2023 concluded with a wealth of insights and updates, featuring over 100 sessions and significant announcements from Kong. The event highlighted the evolving landscape of APIs, emphasizing the importance of API-first strategies and robust API management to tackle the anticipated rise in API-related security threats by 2030. Key discussions included a fireside chat with Martin Casado from Andreessen Horowitz, who underscored the transformative potential of generative AI and its economic feasibility for startups, likening its impact to historical technological shifts. Kong unveiled several enhancements to its platform, including Kong Konnect's new features for API management, the introduction of Kong Insomnia 8.0 with real-time collaboration, and the tech preview of Dedicated Cloud Gateways for heightened performance and security. Customer success stories from companies like Rabobank, SeatGeek, and Aviva showcased how API transformation journeys foster innovation and efficiency. Additionally, Kong collaborated with Apollo to release a blueprint for next-generation API platforms, further solidifying its commitment to advancing API technologies.

Kong Insomnia 8.0, announced at API Summit 2023, marks the most significant release of the software to date, offering a comprehensive overhaul aimed at enhancing developer productivity for API creation, testing, and debugging. The update introduces real-time collaboration, enterprise SSO, Scratch Pad mode, and AI-driven API testing, alongside support for Server-Side Event (SSE) APIs, catering to a wide range of API use cases. The new Scratch Pad feature allows users to try out the product locally without an account, and real-time collaboration tools enable seamless project sharing among team members. The enterprise features include Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) and integration with identity providers like Okta for secure access management. Additionally, the release reintroduces a semantic versioning scheme and includes an offer of a 25% discount on the Enterprise plan until the end of 2023 to encourage the adoption of Kong Insomnia as a standardized API tool.

Kong Konnect has announced a significant update to its SaaS platform at API Summit 2023, introducing a unified API platform that integrates all API runtimes under a single cloud management plane. This platform includes Kong API Gateway, Kong Ingress Controller, and Kong Mesh, allowing for comprehensive API lifecycle management. The modular and extensible architecture supports various use cases and offers a single pane of glass for provisioning and managing traffic across different workloads, enhancing security and performance. Key features include a Service Hub for cataloging and collaborating on API assets, Federated Governance for orchestrating API and developer governance, and robust analytics and monitoring capabilities. Additionally, the platform supports creating API Products for monetization and offers a cloud-native Developer Portal for onboarding developers. Kong Konnect Plus introduces consumption-based billing, providing real-time usage metrics to users. The platform is designed to enable collaboration among architects, developers, and operators to build efficient API-first organizations, with more announcements, including AI integrations, anticipated at the summit.

Kong has announced the release of Kong Manager Open Source, a user interface designed for managing Kong Gateway OSS, which caters to the demand for a more visual and intuitive experience among technically adept users. This feature, previously available only in Kong Enterprise, aims to complement existing tools like decK by providing a visual interface for managing configurations, enabling users to perform tasks with ease and flexibility. Kong Manager Open Source supports various user preferences by allowing configuration changes to be managed visually while still facilitating tracking through Git with decK. It encourages experimentation by enabling users to revert to previous configurations if needed, offering a versatile suite of tools that work together to enhance the functionality and user experience of managing Kong Gateway configurations.

Kong Konnect has evolved into a comprehensive unified API lifecycle management platform that offers a centralized management solution for services from API gateways, Ingress controllers, and service meshes. Announced at API Summit 2023, the platform introduces features aimed at reducing operational overhead and providing deeper insights into API consumption, such as Control Plane Groups, Developer Portal OIDC team mappings, and Custom Plugin Management. These enhancements streamline operations across various environments and improve the developer experience by simplifying the deployment of Kong Mesh and offering a single pane of glass for managing services. The introduction of API Requests, currently in beta, provides detailed records of API usage, aiding developers in troubleshooting and optimizing their APIs. Kong Konnect's expansion also includes support for hosting control planes in multiple geographic regions, enhancing flexibility and accessibility. Additionally, collaborations like the partnership with Apollo on GraphQL provide further resources for API developers navigating the evolving landscape.

APIs play a crucial role in the digital economy, and effective API management is essential for the success of modern applications and businesses. A new guide, released through a collaboration between Kong and Apollo, delves into building and managing next-generation API platforms with GraphQL. The document offers a comprehensive technical examination intended for API practitioners, addressing the challenges that microservice architectures pose to engineering teams. It highlights the importance of three key components of a modern API platform: API gateways for mediating between consumers and producers, GraphQL supergraphs as an access layer for client teams, and service mesh as the foundational microservice layer. The guide provides a reference architecture that explores strategies for building, deploying, and operating APIs, emphasizing the complementary nature of Kong and Apollo technologies. The document positions the companies' SaaS offerings as an optimal solution for constructing secure and dynamic API platforms, encouraging readers to download the guide and participate in advancing API technology.

GraphQL is a versatile query language that enables efficient data fetching from servers by aggregating data from multiple sources into a graph structure, offering significant benefits like preventing over-fetching or under-fetching and supporting client-side data caching. Kong Konnect is an API lifecycle management platform designed for cloud-native environments, providing a management plane hosted by Kong and a data plane managed by customers. It uses an object model to define traffic management policies through components such as Kong Services, Routes, Consumers, and Plugins, which can be extended with functionalities. Kong Konnect's RESTful Admin APIs can be effectively managed using GraphQL queries to streamline the process of querying and manipulating Kong objects, making it a suitable fit for handling complex relationships with single requests. The blog post details the integration of Kong Konnect with AWS AppSync to create a GraphQL API, illustrating the process of setting up resolvers for various queries and using a personal access token for authentication. It also covers the deployment of a Kong Konnect Runtime Instance on Amazon EKS to manage API requests, including the implementation of a GraphQL Rate Limiting Advanced Plugin to control query consumption. The post concludes by highlighting Kong Konnect's role in simplifying API management and securing services, with a promise of further exploration into GraphQL operations like Mutations and Subscriptions in a subsequent post.

The partnership between AWS and Kong has led to the creation of two Kong Konnect AWS EKS Terraform Blueprints AddOns, which are designed to facilitate the deployment of Kong Konnect instances on Amazon EKS. These AddOns leverage the AWS EKS Blueprints in Terraform to streamline the setup of production-ready EKS clusters by incorporating AWS best practices and community-wide standards. The Kong AddOns enable the deployment of Kong Gateway data planes, either independently or alongside the Kong Ingress Controller, with seamless integration with Kong Konnect. This setup provides a production-ready mechanism for managing data plane certificates, utilizing AWS Secrets Manager for secure storage and automatic injection of secrets as Kubernetes resources. The process involves configuring AWS IAM Roles for Service Accounts (IRSA) and deploying necessary external operators and CRDs to achieve secure mTLS connections between the control plane and data planes. The blog post outlines the steps required to bootstrap an EKS cluster with Kong Konnect, emphasizing the speed and automation of provisioning through Terraform scripts, and invites community feedback to enhance the project's scope and utility.

Kong and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have strengthened their partnership, with Kong introducing new contributions to the Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) via the EKS Blueprints for Terraform framework and launching two new workshops. These workshops, focused on Kong Konnect and Kong Mesh, aim to demonstrate the integration of Kong's SaaS Control Plane with Amazon EKS, covering use cases such as caching, authentication, and rate limiting, among others. The Kong Mesh AWS workshop introduces concepts like mTLS communication, traffic permissions, and canary releases to enhance AWS ecosystems. Additionally, Kong has announced new Konnect AddOns for deploying Kong Gateway and Kong Ingress Controller using Terraform, streamlining infrastructure management and deployment. These efforts highlight a commitment to providing scalable, secure, and efficient solutions for managing complex infrastructures, with workshops and resources available to facilitate easy adoption and implementation.

Domain-driven designs are often employed by organizations with complex domain models, typically implemented through REST-based architectures for API entry points. While REST APIs are easy to use for single-domain data, developers face challenges when they need to aggregate data across multiple domains for various applications, often leading to the creation of maintenance-heavy "back-end for front-end" APIs. GraphQL addresses these challenges by allowing flexible queries and decoupling clients from domain services, as exemplified in the fictional airline KongAir's system. KongAir uses GraphQL to aggregate its existing REST APIs, providing a dynamic API experience for developers building user-facing applications. This approach is built on the Apollo Server, where a single GraphQL query can combine data from multiple REST APIs, making it easier for developers to tailor data retrieval to specific application needs without creating new backend services. The process involves defining a GraphQL schema, setting up data sources, and configuring resolvers to map queries to data sources, enabling seamless integration across different domains and simplifying data access for client applications.

Kong Mesh 2.4 introduces significant enhancements in security, flexibility, and resilience to improve digital business infrastructure. The update allows users to provide their own certificates for secure Prometheus metrics scraping, enhancing data security and simplifying integration with external applications. It also supports flexible cross-zone routing for VirtualOutbounds, enabling secure access to complex services in remote zones and facilitating seamless interactions across geographical boundaries. Furthermore, Kong Mesh 2.4 addresses network availability issues in Kubernetes environments by ensuring sidecar containers are ready before application containers launch, reducing connectivity risks. These improvements, along with capabilities for simpler installations and collaborative platform operations, position Kong Mesh as a strategic tool for businesses to protect digital assets, ensure service continuity, and adapt to market changes.

Kong introduces a new approach to API documentation by using a single source of truth in their schemas, which powers both their code and documentation to ensure accuracy and timeliness. They have launched beta OpenAPI specifications for the Kong Gateway Admin API and Konnect Runtime Groups configuration API, which integrate seamlessly with existing toolchains, facilitating SDK generation and interaction through platforms like Kong Insomnia. This approach allows users to compare different API versions, validate endpoint functionality through automated tests, and maintain up-to-date documentation. Although Kong Gateway, an open-source project, initially used Lua schemas as its source of truth, the shift to generating JSON schema entities directly from the code ensures alignment with code changes. Despite the ongoing refinement of the generation process, Kong aims to transition to a design-first methodology where OpenAPI serves as the primary source of truth, while inviting feedback to enhance the specifications further.

In the API-centric world, SOAP and JSON APIs represent different eras of data interchange, with SOAP relying on XML and JSON offering a simpler, more accessible format. Many enterprises with existing SOAP infrastructure face challenges in integrating with modern JSON-based systems. One solution is using protocol translators like Kong Gateway to convert JSON requests into SOAP and vice versa, enabling compatibility without overhauling existing systems. This approach minimizes effort and costs, allowing organizations to modernize APIs while retaining their SOAP-based backends. XSLT, a language designed to process XML, plays a crucial role in handling these transformations, using functions like fn:json-to-xml and fn:xml-to-json to manage data conversions. The blog post outlines how to implement a protocol translator using Kong Gateway and Saxon, an XSLT implementation, through a demonstration of converting a Celsius to Fahrenheit SOAP service into a JSON-based API. The process involves creating a custom Kong plugin to manage these transformations within a Docker container, highlighting the potential for seamless integration between legacy and modern systems.