Talk tech with tips and tutorials from builders at Kong and the Kong Community.
Many of Kong’s features rely on timers, such as caching, DNS, and health checks. Kong also runs some async tasks using the timer, such as the rate-limiting plugin, which connects to the database using the timer to make the request finish quickly. As Kong’s user population grows, so does the…
[](/blog/engineering/scalable-timer-library)
When seemingly random test failures happen, it can be tempting to simply run again and move on. But, as the following example shows, it can be important to not overlook potential issues without investigating to determine the cause of the symptom. In the case of our story, by digging a little deeper…
[](/blog/engineering/troubleshooting-a-journey-into-the-core)
In today's cloud ecosystem the demands for high functioning and high performance observability, security and networking functionality for applications and their network traffic are as high as ever. Historically a great deal of this kind of functionality has been implemented in userspace, but the…
[](/blog/engineering/writing-an-ebpf-xdp-load-balancer-in-rust)
Since the initial launch of Kong Konnect Cloud, one common feature request has (unsurprisingly) been Multi-Region support. Many customers look for SaaS solutions that support a distributed service architecture. Even at its inception, our goal was to support more than a single region. Today, we’re…
[](/blog/engineering/enabling-multi-region-for-kong-konnect-cloud)
Viktor Gamov and Rick Spurgeon co-authored this blog post. Kong Gateway provides dynamic plugin ordering allowing administrators to control plugin execution order. Dynamic plugin ordering was added in Kong Enterprise 3.0 and the full technical reference is available in the official…
[](/blog/engineering/kong-dynamic-plugin-ordering)
Jeff Broberg, William Seaton and Peter Sullivan from Styra also contributed to this post API Gateway Authentication (AuthN) and Authorization (AuthZ) are important ways to control the data that is allowed to be transmitted using your APIs. Basically, it checks that a particular identity has…
[](/blog/engineering/kong-gateway-enterprise-and-styra-das)
There are many pros and cons for both GraphQL and REST APIs, but one of the areas where GraphQL really shines is API composition. Taking data from multiple APIs and combining them to make something new is a key part of delivering a useful service. Today, we're going to take a look at StepZen…
[](/blog/engineering/api-composition-with-stepzen-and-kong)
Security best practices remain a top priority for enterprises, especially as high-profile hacks and cybersecurity breaches pose increased risks. According to the 2022 Morgan Stanley CIO survey , IT spending is expected to reach 4.4%, with cloud computing and security software as the leading…
[](/blog/engineering/defense-in-depth-security)
There are lots of engineering blogs that showcase product features like a tourist destination described in a travel agency brochure, but not enough stories about how the feature came to be, from starting point to the destination, like a travelogue. Today I’m recounting the story of how I added…
[](/blog/engineering/around-v8-in-seventy-days-bringing-a-new-vm-to-wasmx)
Kong Gateway is built on Nginx/OpenResty because it has a unique master/worker architecture, forks out many worker processes, and can utilize every CPU core efficiently. It is the powerhouse within Kong. But one master / multi workers architecture has an annoying defect. Each worker is an isolated…
[](/blog/engineering/nginx-openresty-event-handling-strategy-for-cpu-efficiency)
Decentralization is a common term heard in systems architecture. But what that term means can vary from person to person — especially when Web3 enters the picture. In this post, we'll look at a couple different concepts of decentralization and how the Web3 version differs from Web2. For a primer on…
[](/blog/engineering/web3-basics-what-is-decentralization)
People have strong feelings about Web3. There's debate over if Web3 is the future, a fad, a buzzword, a myth, meaningless marketing malarkey, or maybe even a scam. Yikes. In this post, we'll try to take some of the heat out of the hot takes and focus on some of the basics of Web…
[](/blog/engineering/web3-basics-for-frontend-developers)
As more companies are undergoing digital transformation (resulting in a huge explosion of APIs and microservices), it's of paramount importance to get all the necessary data points and feedback to provide the best experience for both users and developers. Kong Gateway is a lightweight API gateway…
[](/blog/engineering/how-to-parse-and-forward-api-logs)
As engineers and architects, we automatically build resilience into platforms as far as possible. But what about the unknown failures? What about the unknown behavior of your platform? The philosopher, Socrates, once said "You don’t know what you don’t know". What if I could tell you there is a way…
[](/blog/engineering/optimize-your-api-gateway-with-chaos-engineering)
One of the most common use cases our customers are using Kong for is API rate limiting . There are a few common reasons for doing this: For all those and more, we’re able to easily add this functionality with Kong's rate limit advanced plugin . The plugin can be applied at different levels…
[](/blog/engineering/rate-limit-requests-per-consumer-groups)