You've deployed your API. Maybe it's a side project, maybe it's client work, maybe it's the backend for a SaaS you're building on evenings and weekends.

Here's what's probably happening to it right now — without you knowing.

Zero Trust architecture assumes breach — if you assume attackers are already inside, your priority shifts from pure prevention to detection. STOA generates structured audit events and Prometheus metrics that enable detection of credential abuse, prompt injection attempts, rate abuse, and data exfiltration patterns. This article covers what STOA detects, how to query for attack signals, and a practical incident response playbook.

Most "Hello World" tutorials get you to a running endpoint. This one gets you to a protected endpoint — with rate limiting, authentication, and an audit trail — because that's what production actually requires.

This is the freelancer edition: opinionated, fast, and realistic about what breaks first when you launch.

This checklist implements Zero Trust architecture with STOA Platform in 10 actionable steps. Each step is independently deployable and verifiable. Start from the top — steps 1-3 provide the most immediate security improvement and can be implemented in under an hour.

Zero Trust for API gateways means one thing: never trust, always verify — every request, regardless of network origin, must present verifiable identity and be evaluated against explicit policy before receiving access. This article explains the five Zero Trust principles and how they apply specifically to API gateway design, with concrete examples from STOA Platform's implementation.

The biggest STOA release yet — 1,091 commits, 297 features, and a fundamental shift toward AI-native API management.

Run the complete STOA Platform stack on your local machine using Docker Compose. This tutorial shows you how to spin up the Control Plane API, Console UI, Developer Portal, MCP Gateway, Keycloak, and PostgreSQL — all configured and ready to use in under 10 minutes.

AI gateways require specialized rate limiting approaches that account for token consumption, streaming responses, and variable request costs. Traditional request-per-second limits fail to capture the true resource usage of AI workloads. This guide covers token-aware rate limiting strategies, per-tenant quota management, and implementation patterns for production AI gateways.

The OWASP API Security Top 10 (2023) lists the most critical API security risks. An API gateway like STOA helps address several of these at the infrastructure layer — but not all of them. This article maps each OWASP risk to STOA's controls, with an honest assessment of what requires application-level implementation.

We're thrilled to announce the first public release of STOA Platform!