Balancing Control of APIs: Infrastructure Ownership vs Policy Ownership

Empowering engineering teams while increasing velocity and maintaining security in API infrastructure requires a strategic balance between giving engineers autonomy over API policies and having a platform team manage the underlying infrastructure. Engineering teams should focus on developing products and iterating on API policies, utilizing infrastructure capabilities like traffic routing, feature flagging, and access to observability metrics. However, they should not handle infrastructure deployment, security configurations, and cross-cloud connectivity, as these are best managed by the platform team to prevent shadow IT practices and security vulnerabilities. By ensuring infrastructure and configuration segregation, organizations can streamline deployments and avoid inefficiencies, allowing engineers to innovate without compromising security. Kong provides such a solution by offering a unified control plane for managing API infrastructure, helping organizations maintain agility and security simultaneously.