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.

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 platform 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.

What will we build?

By the end of this tutorial you will have a set of Terraform scripts to automatically provision and setup Kong api gateway instance on Digital Ocean platform.

It will become useful set for the future Kong tutorials on Popularowl as you can recreate the fresh Kong api gateway automatically, within minutes.

You can find the source code of files created in this tutorials on GitHub.

Tutorials we publish on Popularowl are practical and hands-on.

In most cases, as a prerequisite, we need to setup one or more virtual servers and pre-install them with  enterprise technology tools and applications.

In addition, we want to be able to destroy all this virtual infrastructure after we finish working with it. And quickly recreate it next time we need the setup.

Infrastructure as a code approach and tools like Terraform will help us solve this challenge.

What will we build?

In this tutorial, we will build the basic Terraform project for automating the provisioning and setup of the virtual machine.

This Terraform project is widely used across multiple other tutorials on Popularowl as a foundation for provisioning required VMs and software.

By the end of this tutorial, you will have a set of files and scripts which allow you to rapidly create and destroy Linux based virtual servers on Digital Ocean.

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 throughput and low footprint foundation.

What will we build?

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

which connects to backend service and is protected by api key.

By the end of this tutorial you will have working Kong setup; new service and route for public api and api key security implemented.

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 documentation

Api first and Api specification first platform development patterns are becoming important part of technology transformation efforts.

Treating your internal and public service Apis as products allows you to assess the business value and necessity before engaging into technology delivery efforts.

Every good technology product should aim to provide helpful documentation. Product adoption depends on it.

In the previous tutorial part, we have covered examples of how to automate Jenkins CI setup and configuration. This tutorial part is about Jenkins plugins and plugin management.

What is Jenkins plugin?

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 and extended by custom code created by community of developers.

Which means that developer community can create core functionality extensions to suit their own needs.