Kubernetes shouldn’t be reserved for production. Using local Kubernetes in development means you can build and test your service using the same technologies as your live deployments. Some organizations provide a shared Kubernetes cluster for development activities. Others offer on-demand virtual clusters that serve staging environments for significant changes.

API gateways are part of every modern microservice architecture. As their name already suggests, they are the gateway into your system; everyone who wants to access your service has to go through a gateway. In 2019, AWS announced HTTP APIs for its API Gateway (APIG) service. This was a big step to add more flexibility and lower latency to APIG. Before this release, you could only build REST APIs with APIG, which only helped when you wanted to create an API based on the REST architecture.

Users nowadays demand the greatest possible experience, which implies top-notch performance. Smooth scrolling, prompt interaction responses, a fast page load time, and flawless animations are all things they anticipate. Local profiling to identify performance issues is convenient, but it only provides a limited amount of information. While things may run smoothly on our high-end developer machines, the user may be dealing with poor hardware and a bad experience.

We’re heavy end-to-end monitoring users here at Checkly and always experiment with how to architect our tests the best way. Over the past months, we’ve settled on a few workflows that make it much easier to spin up new tests, avoid code duplication, and make the entire test setup easier to manage. One of those strategies is to strictly separate concerns in our tests.

With the rise of microservices and distributed systems, more and more data migrates through APIs. So, let’s look at the best ways to monitoring APIs using authentication.