83: Kong, the API/Microservice Management Layer with Ahmad Nassri

This week we are very lucky to have Ahmad Nassri on the show to discuss the world of API’s and how Kong (the API/Microservice management layer) fits into the picture. We start of discussion with how he got into programming and garnered an entrepreneurial spirit in his homeland of Syria, before moving to Canada in his late teens. Following this we chat about his current companies (Mashape) approach to development, picking the right stack and language for the job at hand. Throughout these experiences and their central ‘Marketplace’ product Kong has been developed, helping unify similar API requirements such as logging, authentication and request transformations. As the word ‘microservices’ has been brought up, discussion then centers around his definition of the term and the three pillars (modularization, componentisation, services) he sees there being. We then move on to the decisions behind using Nginx and Lua as the base for Kong’s development, along with a look into the Lua ecosystem and Mashape’s many contributions. Finally, we chat about Kong’s plugin architecture and the vibrant community/projects that have been created since its initial inception.