Today marks a milestone for Fastly: we’ve officially welcomed Signal Sciences onto our team, and…
The rise of the API Gateway
In the dramatic shift to microservices and APIs to speed up development and break monolithic applications down into more performant pieces, the API gateway has become a critical piece of enterprise infrastructure.
Even our friends at Gartner have created a joint category for security of applications and APIs called cloud web application and API protection (WAAP). This points to how today’s application development goes hand in hand with APIs.
This, by no means, is a canonical explanation of the benefits of API gateways, but put simply, API gateways serve these core functions:
- Authenticating
- Load Balancing
- Security
- Logging
- Rate limiting
- …and more
Kong Signal Sciences: a perfect partnership for API and serverless security
To us, Kong really stands out in its ability to be speedy and easily scalable – and its extensibility for partners is second to none. With the launch of Kong Hub announced today at their Kong Summit in SF — with which Signal Sciences is proud to be a launch partner — we further our ability to support and secure apps running across any architecture.
With a simple lua plugin and software agent from Signal Sciences, Kong users can gain visibility and security of requests passing through the gateway.
Serverless — so hot right now
The stats are a bit tricky to nail down, but some reports show container and serverless adoption are neck and neck. It’s important to many of our customers, from mid-market to large enterprise, and we’re thrilled we can offer serverless support due to Kong’s extensible architecture.
Through Kong Hub, you can find plugins that extend support to serverless functions that sit behind its API Gateway, explained here for an AWS Lambda example Plugins exist for Azure functions and OpenWhisk as well.
One of our joint customers, Jonathan Agha, VP Information Security at WeWork puts it best: “Using the integrated solution from Kong and Signal Sciences gives us the support we need across all applications, including serverless applications, regardless of how or where they are deployed. With Kong and Signal Sciences, we get greater visibility and architectural flexibility than we have had in the past, without sacrificing performance.”
We’ll have more to come on Kong and serverless in future posts — in the meantime, we invite you to check it out for yourself!
Related resources:
Signal Sciences – Kong Integration Data Sheet
Container, Microservices, & API Data Sheet
Signal Sciences-Kong Integration: Request a Free Trial