Explore foundational guides unlocking key industry concepts and technologies.
OAuth (short for Open Authorization) is a popular, standardized API protocol that provides a secure way for services to quickly share resources for a seamless user experience. Examples of OAuth in action include giving a greeting card service access to your photo library to make a custom holiday…
[](/blog/learning-center/what-is-oauth)An Application Programming Interface (API) is a software endpoint that allows communication between two separate services. APIs are typically accessed by humans, applications, or even other APIs using the HTTP protocol. But what happens when there's an API outage and those APIs go offline? For end…
[](/blog/learning-center/what-is-an-api-outage)What is an API Gateway? In essence, it authenticates that a particular consumer has permission to access the API, using a predefined set of credentials. There are special cases — for example, the option to allow anonymous authentication — but generally speaking, the aim of API authentication is to…
[](/blog/learning-center/api-gateway-authentication)With cloud-native technology gaining popularity by the day, it's crucial for businesses to stay up-to-date with its innovative architecture and functionalities. As opposed to traditional monolithic architectures, cloud-native infrastructure adopts a modular design made up of small but powerful…
[](/blog/learning-center/what-is-cloud-native)A microservice -based system can consist of dozens or even hundreds of individual services communicating with each other via APIs . While its possible for a client be that a web browser, application or IoT device to make requests to the relevant microservice directly, this approach has a number of…
[](/blog/learning-center/api-gateway-uses)Microservices architecture has become extremely popular for building scalable applications from small, independent services. However, the decentralized nature of microservices brings certain drawbacks that API gateways are purpose-built to address. This article explains the role and benefits of…
[](/blog/learning-center/why-microservices-need-api-gateway)If the connection from clients to your API gateway isn't encrypted, all messages you send and receive are out in the open for all to read. In looking for a way in, attackers will make use of all features of an API, even the undocumented ones; security by obscurity is not a realistic defense…
[](/blog/learning-center/building-a-secure-api-gateway)An API gateway provides routing, traffic control and security capabilities which would otherwise be the responsibility of API consumers and upstream APIs. Additionally, the Gateway becomes a rich source of operational metrics useful for analytics, usage statistics and alerting. However, by…
[](/blog/learning-center/secure-api-gateway)Monitoring the health of your production system involves keeping track of various data points in real time in order to derive insights from them. Day to day, monitoring can provide early indications of problems, giving the team time to investigate and fix before a system fails completely. If youre…
[](/blog/learning-center/monitoring-and-distributed-tracing-for-microservices)Authentication is the process of determining who a user is by, for example, asking them to provide a username and password or using multi-factor authentication. Once you know who the user is, you can check their account details to determine what they are authorized to access. Creating a session for…
[](/blog/learning-center/microservices-security-and-session-management)In this article, were going to walk through a brief origin of RESTful APIs and then take a good look at what to consider when building your own APIs with RESTful design. RE presentational S tate T ransfer or REST is an architectural pattern designed by Roy Fielding, in a chapter of the dissertation…
[](/blog/learning-center/restful-api-best-practices)While this idiom generally refers to the concept of avoiding the investment of all of ones energy or resources into a single venture at the risk of losing everything, in this context, the risk of locking in to a single vendor is a different cost: budget, manpower and time. When migrating an…
[](/blog/learning-center/vendor-lock-in)One of the many benefits of a microservices architecture over the traditional monolith approach to application design is the ability to scale the individual microservices as required for performance and availability. In production scenarios requiring high availability, uptime is always limited by…
[](/blog/learning-center/api-gateways-for-high-availability-clusters)What do these terms mean? Do they refer to the same things in Kubernetes as they do in a service mesh? If you've encountered difficulty searching for a straight answer, look no further. Ultimately, the terms control plane and data plane are all about the separation of concern — that is, a clear…
[](/blog/learning-center/control-plane-vs-data-plane)Hybrid and multi-cloud models have become popular for helping to prevent vendor lock-in, reducing costs, and allowing businesses to stay innovative by only using the best features of each cloud provider. Adopting a hybrid model has also been influenced by growing security concerns and tougher…
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