The API gateway landscape has evolved rapidly with the rise of AI agents, zero-trust architectures, and hybrid deployments. This glossary defines 30 essential terms every developer should know when working with modern API gateways in 2026.
STOA Gateway adds less than 2 microseconds of total overhead per request with API key auth and rate limiting enabled. Every benchmark is reproducible with published scripts, and our Gateway Arena runs comparative tests every 30 minutes on identical infrastructure.
This post shares our benchmarking approach, key results, and how you can reproduce everything yourself.
Deleted API keys stay in git history forever. This article shows you how to detect leaked secrets with gitleaks, remove them from history, and prevent future leaks with pre-commit hooks and proper secret management.
You removed the hardcoded API key from your code. You committed the fix. You pushed. You're safe now, right?
No. The key is still in your git history. Anyone with git log -p can find it in seconds.
This isn't a theoretical risk. GitHub scans over 100 million commits per day and finds thousands of valid secrets — API keys, database passwords, cloud credentials. Most of them were "removed" by developers who thought deleting the line was enough.
This is one of the most critical security gaps in modern API development — and one of the reasons we built STOA as an open-source API gateway with secrets management as a default, not an add-on.
Migrating from Axway API Gateway to an open-source alternative is a structured process that can be completed in 4-6 months using a phased, zero-downtime approach. This guide provides a feature mapping, migration roadmap, and practical advice for enterprise teams evaluating their options.
Every REST API endpoint can become an MCP tool that AI agents discover and invoke automatically. The conversion is a mapping exercise: your OpenAPI spec already contains the tool name, description, parameters, and endpoint URL that MCP needs. This guide walks through the process from a single endpoint to bulk automation using ToolSet CRDs.
AI agents need a secure, standardized way to access your APIs. The Model Context Protocol (MCP) provides that bridge, and STOA Platform makes it trivial to deploy. In this tutorial, you'll learn how to set up a production-ready MCP gateway using Docker Compose in under 10 minutes.
New to MCP gateways? Start with our comprehensive guide: What is an MCP Gateway? to understand the architecture and security model before deploying.
By the end of this guide, you'll have a running gateway that exposes your existing REST APIs to AI agents like Claude, connects to authentication, and enforces runtime policies.
The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is a JSON-RPC 2.0 based protocol that standardizes how AI agents discover, authenticate with, and invoke external tools. It defines four phases — initialization, discovery, invocation, and streaming — over pluggable transports including SSE, WebSocket, and stdio. This article covers the protocol internals that matter for production deployments.
Three approaches dominate how AI agents call external tools in 2026: the Model Context Protocol (MCP), OpenAI Function Calling, and LangChain Tools. MCP is an open protocol for runtime tool discovery across any AI provider. OpenAI Function Calling is a proprietary API feature tightly integrated with OpenAI models. LangChain Tools is a framework abstraction that wraps tool definitions for orchestration pipelines. They solve different problems, operate at different layers, and can coexist in the same architecture.
WSO2 API Manager is an established open-source API management platform used by enterprises worldwide. As the API management landscape evolves — with AI agent protocols, Kubernetes-native architectures, and stricter European regulations — some teams are evaluating alternatives that better align with their current requirements. This guide provides a feature comparison, migration approach, and practical guidance.
Migrating from a existing API gateway is one of the highest-stakes infrastructure projects an enterprise platform team can undertake. Done well, it eliminates years of accumulated technical debt, reduces licensing costs, and opens the door to AI agent integration. Done poorly, it disrupts production APIs and erodes trust with every team that depends on the platform.
This guide provides a vendor-neutral framework for planning and executing an API gateway migration in 2026 — covering assessment, policy translation, phased traffic migration, and the new requirements introduced by AI agents. Specific guidance for individual platforms (Broadcom Layer7, Software AG webMethods, Axway, Apigee) is linked throughout.