How to monitor APIs with Google Sheets

How to monitor APIs with Google Sheets

In this tutorial you will learn how to setup a simple API monitoring tool using widely adopted Google Sheets.

We will build simple API monitoring spreadsheet, using Google Sheets with the scheduled tests.

Tests will run HTTP requests against the list the API endpoints we specify.

Lets get started.

Which API security tools?

Which API security tools?

Increasing number of openly available APIs and API products in todays app driven landscape is creating governance and security challenges in this space.

In this post I have summarized the common API security tools and frameworks which we are using to design and implement API security standards. It serves as a catalogue for our API design and delivery engagements.

You are welcome to suggest any tools or frameworks which we missed on this list.

Jenkins plugins and plugin management

Jenkins plugins and plugin management

One of the main strengths of Jenkins continuous integration server is its extensibility via plugins.

Jenkins defines the set of interfaces which can be implemented to extend core funcionality with custom code.

This means that external developer community can extend core Jenkins CI functionality by building extensions. There are more than 1000 such custom plugins available in the official Jenkins CI plugin repository.

Building and destroying projects with Terraform

Building and destroying projects with Terraform

While creating lessons and tutorials on Popularowl in most cases, as a prerequisite, we need to start one or more virtual servers and pre-install them with necesary tools and applications.

After we finished using these virtual machines, we want to be able to destroy this virtual infrastructure. And quickly recreate it next time we need the setup.

This saves us time and we only pay for usage when our VM instances are active.

In this tutorial we have step by step guide how to use Infrastructure as a code approach and Terraform to provision a new virtual servers for training projects.

Which API testing framework you should use?

Which API testing framework you should use?

Application development lifecycle defines how we plan, deliver, test and maintain technology products.

As api first pattern is growing in popularity, automated quality assurance becomes one of the key parts of such lifecycle.

Test driven development is a software development practice which describes the pattern of writing tests before implementing software.

This post lists multiple api testing frameworks and tools which can be used for testing the apis. Stand alone or as part of software development lifecycle.

Which API documentation tools should I use for my platform?

Which API documentation tools should I use for my platform?

In the previous posts we took a close look at api gateway platforms and api testing tools. This post is about the most popular api documentation tools and frameworks.

API mocking. Most popular frameworks and libraries

API mocking. Most popular frameworks and libraries

Dependency mocking is a big part of the software development lifecycle in almost every organization.

In order to continuously develop and test applications we have to handle multiple dependency systems which we rely on for integration reasons.

Many times, such dependencies are not under our control. We have no influence how these dependency systems are developed, released or tested.

This is where mocking and specially backend API contract mocking comes to the rescue.

Kong api gateway. Getting started

Kong api gateway. Getting started

This post is part of the tutorial series about using Kong api gateway product in your technology stack.

Kong is an open source product based on the Nginx server and OpenResty framework. Both of these underlying technologies provide Kong with the high transaction throughput and very low memory footprint foundation.

The goal of this tutorial is to get started with Kong api gateway and build secure public api endpoint.

Automating Kong api gateway setup with Terraform

Automating Kong api gateway setup with Terraform

This post is part of the tutorial series about using Kong API gateway in your technology stack.

In this part of tutorial we will go through the steps of automating Kong API gateway setup. Using the commands we manually did in the previous tutorial part.

We will follow the infrastructure as a code pattern, which will allow us to recreate this setup every time we need it in the future.

Automate API mocking with WireMock and Terraform

Automate API mocking with WireMock and Terraform

In Popularowl tutorials we build practical implementations and demos for open source enterprise technology products.

In the most cases, to perform the the validation and test functionality, we have to provision multiple mocked backend applications.

In this tutorial we will build the Terraform based project which allows to setup, create and destroy backend API mocks in automated and reusable way.

We will containerise these backend API mocks so they can be run in any environment where Docker is supported.