Kong: The Cloud-Native API Gateway

Kong

Kong or Kong API Gateway is a cloud-native, platform-agnostic, scalable API Gateway distinguished for its high performance and extensibility via plugins.

By providing functionality for proxying, routing, load balancing, health checking, authentication (and more), Kong serves as the central layer for orchestrating microservices or conventional API traffic with ease.

Kong runs natively on Kubernetes thanks to its official Kubernetes Ingress Controller.

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Getting Started

Let’s test drive Kong by adding authentication to an API in under 5 minutes.

We suggest using the docker-compose distribution via the instructions below, but there is also a docker installation procedure if you’d prefer to run the Kong API Gateway in DB-less mode.

Whether you’re running in the cloud, on bare metal, or using containers, you can find every supported distribution on our official installation page.

To start, clone the Docker repository and navigate to the compose folder.

  $ git clone https://github.com/Kong/docker-kong
  $ cd compose/

Start the Gateway stack using:

  $ KONG_DATABASE=postgres docker-compose --profile database up

The Gateway will be available on the following ports on localhost:

:8000 on which Kong listens for incoming HTTP traffic from your clients, and forwards it to your upstream services. :8001 on which the Admin API used to configure Kong listens.

Next, follow the quick start guide to tour the Gateway features.

Features

By centralizing common API functionality across all your organization's services, the Kong API Gateway creates more freedom for engineering teams to focus on the challenges that matter most.

The top Kong features include:

• Advanced routing, load balancing, health checking - all configurable via a RESTful admin API or declarative configuration.
• Authentication and authorization for APIs using methods like JWT, basic auth, OAuth, ACLs and more.
• Proxy, SSL/TLS termination, and connectivity support for L4 or L7 traffic.
• Plugins for enforcing traffic controls, rate limiting, req/res transformations, logging, monitoring and including a plugin developer hub.
• Sophisticated deployment models like Declarative Databaseless Deployment and Hybrid Deployment (control plane/data plane separation) without any vendor lock-in.
• Native ingress controller support for serving Kubernetes.

Plugin Hub

Plugins provide advanced functionality that extends the use of the Gateway. Many of the Kong Inc. and community-developed plugins like AWS Lambda, Correlation ID, and Response Transformer are showcased at the Plugin Hub.

Contribute to the Plugin Hub and ensure your next innovative idea is published and available to the broader community!

Contributing

We ❤️ pull requests, and we’re continually working hard to make it as easy as possible for developers to contribute. Before beginning development with the Kong API Gateway, please familiarize yourself with the following developer resources:

• Contributor Guide (CONTRIBUTING.md) to learn about how to contribute to Kong.
• Development Guide (DEVELOPER.md): Setting up your development environment.
• CODE_OF_CONDUCT and COPYRIGHT

Use the Plugin Development Guide for building new and creative plugins, or browse the online version of Kong's source code documentation in the Plugin Development Kit (PDK) Reference. Developers can build plugins in Lua, Go or JavaScript.

Releases

Please see the Changelog for more details about a given release. The SemVer Specification is followed when versioning Gateway releases.

Join the Community

• Join the Kong discussions at the Kong Nation forum: https://discuss.konghq.com/
• Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekonginc
• Check out the docs: https://docs.konghq.com/
• Keep updated on YouTube by subscribing: https://www.youtube.com/c/KongInc/videos
• Read up on the latest happenings at our blog: https://konghq.com/blog/
• Visit our homepage to learn more: https://konghq.com/

Konnect Cloud

Kong Inc. offers commercial subscriptions that enhance the Kong API Gateway in a variety of ways. Customers of Kong's Konnect Cloud subscription take advantage of additional gateway functionality, commercial support, and access to Kong's managed (SaaS) control plane platform. The Konnect Cloud platform features include real-time analytics, a service catalog, developer portals, and so much more! Get started with Konnect Cloud.
 

  $ KONG_DATABASE=postgres docker-compose --profile database up

  $ git clone https://github.com/Kong/docker-kong
  $ cd compose/

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Installation | Documentation | Discussions | Forum | Blog | Builds

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Download Details:

Author: Kong
Source Code: https://github.com/Kong/kong 
License: Apache-2.0 license

#serverless #docker #nginx #kubernetes #iot #devops 

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How native is React Native? | React Native vs Native App Development

If you are undertaking a mobile app development for your start-up or enterprise, you are likely wondering whether to use React Native. As a popular development framework, React Native helps you to develop near-native mobile apps. However, you are probably also wondering how close you can get to a native app by using React Native. How native is React Native?

In the article, we discuss the similarities between native mobile development and development using React Native. We also touch upon where they differ and how to bridge the gaps. Read on.

A brief introduction to React Native

Let’s briefly set the context first. We will briefly touch upon what React Native is and how it differs from earlier hybrid frameworks.

React Native is a popular JavaScript framework that Facebook has created. You can use this open-source framework to code natively rendering Android and iOS mobile apps. You can use it to develop web apps too.

Facebook has developed React Native based on React, its JavaScript library. The first release of React Native came in March 2015. At the time of writing this article, the latest stable release of React Native is 0.62.0, and it was released in March 2020.

Although relatively new, React Native has acquired a high degree of popularity. The “Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2019” report identifies it as the 8th most loved framework. Facebook, Walmart, and Bloomberg are some of the top companies that use React Native.

The popularity of React Native comes from its advantages. Some of its advantages are as follows:

• Performance: It delivers optimal performance.
• Cross-platform development: You can develop both Android and iOS apps with it. The reuse of code expedites development and reduces costs.
• UI design: React Native enables you to design simple and responsive UI for your mobile app.
• 3rd party plugins: This framework supports 3rd party plugins.
• Developer community: A vibrant community of developers support React Native.

Why React Native is fundamentally different from earlier hybrid frameworks

Are you wondering whether React Native is just another of those hybrid frameworks like Ionic or Cordova? It’s not! React Native is fundamentally different from these earlier hybrid frameworks.

React Native is very close to native. Consider the following aspects as described on the React Native website:

• Access to many native platforms features: The primitives of React Native render to native platform UI. This means that your React Native app will use many native platform APIs as native apps would do.
• Near-native user experience: React Native provides several native components, and these are platform agnostic.
• The ease of accessing native APIs: React Native uses a declarative UI paradigm. This enables React Native to interact easily with native platform APIs since React Native wraps existing native code.

Due to these factors, React Native offers many more advantages compared to those earlier hybrid frameworks. We now review them.

#android app #frontend #ios app #mobile app development #benefits of react native #is react native good for mobile app development #native vs #pros and cons of react native #react mobile development #react native development #react native experience #react native framework #react native ios vs android #react native pros and cons #react native vs android #react native vs native #react native vs native performance #react vs native #why react native #why use react native

Multi-cloud Spending: 8 Tips To Lower Cost

A multi-cloud approach is nothing but leveraging two or more cloud platforms for meeting the various business requirements of an enterprise. The multi-cloud IT environment incorporates different clouds from multiple vendors and negates the dependence on a single public cloud service provider. Thus enterprises can choose specific services from multiple public clouds and reap the benefits of each.

Given its affordability and agility, most enterprises opt for a multi-cloud approach in cloud computing now. A 2018 survey on the public cloud services market points out that 81% of the respondents use services from two or more providers. Subsequently, the cloud computing services market has reported incredible growth in recent times. The worldwide public cloud services market is all set to reach $500 billion in the next four years, according to IDC.

By choosing multi-cloud solutions strategically, enterprises can optimize the benefits of cloud computing and aim for some key competitive advantages. They can avoid the lengthy and cumbersome processes involved in buying, installing and testing high-priced systems. The IaaS and PaaS solutions have become a windfall for the enterprise’s budget as it does not incur huge up-front capital expenditure.

However, cost optimization is still a challenge while facilitating a multi-cloud environment and a large number of enterprises end up overpaying with or without realizing it. The below-mentioned tips would help you ensure the money is spent wisely on cloud computing services.

• Deactivate underused or unattached resources

Most organizations tend to get wrong with simple things which turn out to be the root cause for needless spending and resource wastage. The first step to cost optimization in your cloud strategy is to identify underutilized resources that you have been paying for.

Enterprises often continue to pay for resources that have been purchased earlier but are no longer useful. Identifying such unused and unattached resources and deactivating it on a regular basis brings you one step closer to cost optimization. If needed, you can deploy automated cloud management tools that are largely helpful in providing the analytics needed to optimize the cloud spending and cut costs on an ongoing basis.

• Figure out idle instances

Another key cost optimization strategy is to identify the idle computing instances and consolidate them into fewer instances. An idle computing instance may require a CPU utilization level of 1-5%, but you may be billed by the service provider for 100% for the same instance.

Every enterprise will have such non-production instances that constitute unnecessary storage space and lead to overpaying. Re-evaluating your resource allocations regularly and removing unnecessary storage may help you save money significantly. Resource allocation is not only a matter of CPU and memory but also it is linked to the storage, network, and various other factors.

• Deploy monitoring mechanisms

The key to efficient cost reduction in cloud computing technology lies in proactive monitoring. A comprehensive view of the cloud usage helps enterprises to monitor and minimize unnecessary spending. You can make use of various mechanisms for monitoring computing demand.

For instance, you can use a heatmap to understand the highs and lows in computing visually. This heat map indicates the start and stop times which in turn lead to reduced costs. You can also deploy automated tools that help organizations to schedule instances to start and stop. By following a heatmap, you can understand whether it is safe to shut down servers on holidays or weekends.

#cloud computing services #all #hybrid cloud #cloud #multi-cloud strategy #cloud spend #multi-cloud spending #multi cloud adoption #why multi cloud #multi cloud trends #multi cloud companies #multi cloud research #multi cloud market

API Rate Limiting with Spring Cloud Gateway

One of the imperative architectural concerns is to protect APIs and service endpoints from harmful effects, such as denial of service, cascading failure. or overuse of resources. Rate limiting is a technique to control the rate by which an API or a service is consumed. In a distributed system, no better option exists than to centralize configuring and managing the rate at which consumers can interact with APIs. Only those requests within a defined rate would make it to the API. Any more would raise an HTTP “Many requests” error.

Spring Cloud Gateway (SCG) is a simple and lightweight component, yet it is an effective way to manage limiting API consumption rates. In this blog, I am going to illustrate how simply that can be accomplished by using a configuration method. As illustrated in the figure below, the demonstration consists of a frontend and backend services with a Spring Cloud Gateway service in between.

No code whatsoever is needed to include the SCG in the architecture. You need to include a Spring Boot Cloud dependency org.springframework.cloud:spring-cloud-starter-gateway in a vanilla Spring Boot application, and you’re set to go with the appropriate configuration settings.

Requests received by SCG from a frontend service can be routed to a backend service based on a configured route definition. A route definition configuration specifies to the gateway how a request should be routed to a backend endpoint. A route configuration usually defines conditions based on information that can be extracted from HTTP requests, such as paths and headers.

#[object object] #api rate limiting with spring cloud gateway #api #spring cloud #spring cloud gateway #api rate limiting with spring cloud gateway

Public ASX100 APIs: The Essential List

We’ve conducted some initial research into the public APIs of the ASX100 because we regularly have conversations about what others are doing with their APIs and what best practices look like. Being able to point to good local examples and explain what is happening in Australia is a key part of this conversation.

Method

The method used for this initial research was to obtain a list of the ASX100 (as of 18 September 2020). Then work through each company looking at the following:

1. Whether the company had a public API: this was found by googling “[company name] API” and “[company name] API developer” and “[company name] developer portal”. Sometimes the company’s website was navigated or searched.
2. Some data points about the API were noted, such as the URL of the portal/documentation and the method they used to publish the API (portal, documentation, web page).
3. Observations were recorded that piqued the interest of the researchers (you will find these below).
4. Other notes were made to support future research.
5. You will find a summary of the data in the infographic below.

Data

With regards to how the APIs are shared:

• Documentation is where just the Swagger/OpenAPI docs are hosted somewhere. e.g. https://api.linkgroup.com/member/docs/index
• Portal is where an interactive portal has been developed. e.g. https://dev.telstra.com/
• The web page is where the company has a single page that isn’t interactive explaining their Public APIs. e.g. https://www.bendigoadelaide.com.au/banking-products-api.asp

#api #api-development #api-analytics #apis #api-integration #api-testing #api-security #api-gateway

Becoming Cloud Native

There are few companies operating in today’s markets affected most recently as we are with the events of 2020 that have not undergone a digital transformation of some sort. Research shows that 80% of executives are accelerating plans to digitize work processes and deploy new technologies in response to the impact of COVID on the business world. The traditional model of business is undergoing radical change in an endeavour to employ digital technologies better to suit multiple purposes across a variety of sectors, and cloud native is one of the key drivers that re-architects cloud environments with the intent of adapting the means for how to deliver services. cloud native is a modern and advanced software development approach; which is why it is becoming of high importance to many companies.

Digital Transformation Risks

But moving to a new software development approach is not easy, and organizations can be slow to adopt radical change in the interests of safeguarding their market, output and business. So, to mitigate risk, organizations can take a step-by-step approach to becoming cloud native in several phases, where they can first replicate the new approach on a smaller scale inside a department/team/project architecture to test the results. If positive, it is then possible to scale the approach organization-wide continuously till the whole enterprise cloud architecture becomes cloud native. If implemented correctly, the cloud native approach supports organizations to improve speed, agility, and resilience in the app development and management process.

#cloud native #cloud #cloud computing #cloud native development #cloud-native applications