Clients
Maple consultancy group is happy to help various clients in different scales and capacities, below are some of our clients.
Linux System Monitoring Basic Commands | PDF
Linux System Monitoring basic commands from Mohammad Rafiee
API Development
Many of us may remember King Kong movie in mid-seventies, a giant monster climbing Manhattan buildings grabbing planes with hands and smash them to the ground.
Kong and skull island has a different meaning when it comes to Software, API development and DevOps world.
API development is a fast-growing trend among all technology-driven companies. Its management and administration is becoming a concern. In small companies, API gateway can be simplified to a HTTP server but when number of API endpoints increases to more than a couple of hundreds, it would be a massive integration and deployment overhead associated with it.
This is a common problem these days; lots of enterprises offer commercial and proprietary solutions to address API gateway and management. Opensource community on the other side of this equation introduced a bunch of projects like Tyk, wso2, gravitee and Kong which I want to talk about in this article.
Kong is an opensource API gateway tool developed by Mashape company. It has been developed in Lua and published under Apache License 2.0; its source code can be found in GitHub. The community is actively working on it and new features and bug fixes are getting merged within days. For instance, we had an issue connecting to Cassandra database over SSL and they resolved it in hours.
Since Kong is very API rich itself, there are a bunch of tooling around it such as web dashboards, monitoring, and backup tools.
We gave a couple of backup and restore tools a try. Tools such as Kongfig and Biplane are developed to do the backup and restore endpoints but each of these tools had their limitations. Kongfig, for example, is a great tool to backup your API endpoints but when it comes to Continuous Deployment process, it does not modify the endpoints in place. It only is able to append endpoints at the end of the list which is fair because it meant to do backup and restore.
Biplane, on the other hand, has been written in Crystal; it is very nice in the syncing process. It is built to be used for Docker containers but we did not find it "docker independent" in case you want to run it outside of the container box. Since Crystal itself is not mature enough, we were not able to build it from source in different Linux distros.
Skull Island is another tool built in Node by Calvin Fernandez and published to the opensource community under the MIT license. This project is inspired by Kongfig and Biplane and covers the weak points of those projects.
I found full (API Endpoints, Consumers and plugins) Synchronization in Skull Island so handy over the other two tools; also in CI/CD process it is so flexible to run since it’s in Node.
Combination of Kong, Skull Island, Kong dashboard, and Galileo for monitoring would cover most of the requirements and would be a nice API gateway solution to every API development team across the world and I highly recommend it.