Thursday, August 3, 2017

Kong API Developer Portal

Kong is a scalable, open source API Gateway. Kong runs in front of any RESTful API and is extended through Plugins, which provide extra functionality and services beyond the core platform.


We explored Kong few months back and liked it for its flexibility and scalability. A customer came along and was willing to give open source a try. Deal on.

During development, we discovered that Kong is overly flexible. :)  

I still remember the days when we were Compuware partner deploying and giving consultation to Dynatrace customers. There were far too many features and it allowed great flexibility. Beginners or customers who were not too technical complained. They got lost. 

With that experience still fresh in my mind, I suggested that we build a API Developer Portal on our own. And this portal should cater for this customer's daily operations. Nothing else. Whatever is not required, we should hide it.


The team has done a great job!






For this particular customer, the business use case is simple.

1. They have their internal application teams ("Clients") that want to consume APIs.
2. Each client will be issued a Client ID and Client Secret to exchange for a OAuth2 token prior to calling APIs.
3. Each client can only be granted access to specific set of APIs ("Service")


So, the UI is simplified to suit this need.

a. Create API



b. Assign API to Service



 c. Create Client and assign Service to Client




Very simple to use to get the job done.


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