Kong x Apollo London Meetup: Observability in Action

We are thrilled to invite you to our Meetup in London in collaboration with Apollo GraphQL!

Kong is powering the API World. Kong enables any company to become an API-first company. Kong’s unified cloud native API platform is easy to use and works in any environment — unleashing developer productivity, automating security, and boosting performance of APIs and microservices at scale.

Apollo GraphQL helps developers help the world by providing a better API integration layer across teams. Teams at Netflix, Volvo, and Booking.com ship personalised, omnichannel experiences faster with a supergraph – a self-service GraphQL platform that spans any number of backend services. Serving over 5T requests in 2023, the Apollo GraphOS platform simplifies API development with workflows and infrastructure to build, test, and ship supergraphs at any scale.

When
March 14, 18:00 - 21:00

Where
The Dixon Hotel, 211 Tooley St, London SE1 2JX

Agenda
18:00 - 18:30 Everyone arrives, networking, snacks & drinks
18:30 - 19:15 [Talk 1] Observability in Action, Unveiling the Power of Kong Gateway by Timo Gerhard (Staff Field Engineer, Kong)
19:15 - 20:00 [Talk 2] Evolving Your API Strategy with a Platform Mindset by Guillaume Scheibel (Principal Engineer, Apollo GraphQL)
20:00 - 21:00 Networking, snacks & drinks

Talks
1) Observability in Action, Unveiling the Power of Kong Gateway
Embark on a journey into the realm of observability with Timo Gerhard. In this enlightening session, discover the art and science of integrating observability practices at both the API layer and the domain layer.

Get an exclusive insider's view of how observability transforms the landscape of modern systems. From metrics and logs to traces, explore the intricate web of observability tools and techniques that empower you to unravel the mysteries of complex distributed systems.

• Introduction to Kong Gateway and its role in modern microservices architectures
• The importance of observability in distributed systems
• Overview of metrics, logs and traces and their significance in observability
• Examples and best practices for implementing observability with Kong Gateway
• Interactive Q&A

2) Evolving Your API Strategy with a Platform Mindset
Learn how to integrate platform engineering concepts and processes at the API layer as well as at the domain layer, and get an insider’s view of a successful supergraph in production from veteran platform engineer Guillaume Scheibel.

Whether you are looking to improve your existing strategy or are totally new to Apollo Federation, this session will provide you with a playbook for architecting an API platform that drives developer velocity, composability and reuse.

• Guidelines for adopting API platform engineering in your organization
• High-level requirements for implementing API platform engineering
• A basic framework for an API platform that promotes composability and reuse

Speakers
Guillaume Scheibel (Principal Engineer, Apollo GraphQL)
Guillaume is a Principal Engineer at Apollo GraphQL. As a former Principal Software Development Engineer at Expedia, he provided technical leadership to ensure that Platform teams were inline with business units. This included platform requirements for infrastructure, as well as APIs. He was a key contributor to Expedia’s shift to a federated GraphQL architecture.

Timo Gerhard (Staff Field Engineer, Kong)
Timo Gerhard is a Stuttgart-based field engineer. As a former DevOps engineer, Timo was deeply involved in deploying, configuring and optimising API infrastructure for diverse industries. At Kong, he provides tailored solutions for customers, whether it's designing scalable architectures, troubleshooting complex issues or conducting training sessions for technical teams.