# Clients of Maple Consultancy Group

Maple consultancy group is happy to help various clients in different scales and capacities, below are some of our clients.

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## Linux System Monitoring Basic Commands

[View on Slideshare](https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/monitoring-920626/26265572)

**[Linux System Monitoring basic commands](https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/monitoring-920626/26265572 "Linux System Monitoring basic commands")** from **[Mohammad Rafiee](https://www.slideshare.net/MohammadRafiee)**

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## API Development in DevOps

Many of us may remember the King Kong movie in the mid-seventies, a giant monster climbing Manhattan buildings, grabbing planes with hands, and smashing them to the ground.

Kong and Skull Island has a different meaning when it comes to Software, API development, and the 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, the API gateway can be simplified to an HTTP server, but when the number of API endpoints increases to more than a couple of hundreds, it results in massive integration and deployment overhead.

This is a common problem these days, and lots of enterprises offer commercial and proprietary solutions to address API gateway and management. The open-source community, on the other hand, has introduced various projects like Tyk, WSO2, Gravitee, and Kong, which I want to talk about in this article.

Kong is an open-source API gateway tool developed by Mashape. It has been developed in Lua and is published under the Apache License 2.0. The source code can be found on [Github](https://github.com/Mashape/kong). 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 it was resolved in hours.

Since Kong is very API rich itself, there are several tooling around it, such as web dashboards, monitoring, and backup tools.

We tried out a couple of backup and restore tools. Tools such as Kongfig and Biplane are developed for backing up and restoring endpoints, but each of these tools has its limitations. Kongfig, for example, is great for backing up your API endpoints, but when it comes to the Continuous Deployment process, it does not modify the endpoints in place; it can only append endpoints at the end of the list, which is fair since it is meant for backup and restoration.

Biplane, on the other hand, is written in Crystal and 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 unable to build it from source in different Linux distros.

[Skull Island](https://github.com/calvinlfer/skull-island) is another tool built in Node by [Calvin Fernandez](https://www.linkedin.com/in/calvin-fernandes-5984087a/) and published to the open-source community under the MIT license. This project is inspired by Kongfig and Biplane and addresses the weaknesses of those projects.

I found full synchronization (API Endpoints, Consumers, and plugins) in Skull Island to be incredibly handy compared to the other two tools; also in the CI/CD process, it is flexible to run since it’s in Node.

Combining Kong, Skull Island, Kong dashboard, and Galileo for monitoring would cover most of the requirements and would provide a robust API gateway solution for API development teams across the world, and I highly recommend it.