We’re entering a new stratosphere, so much so, we have left version 2 and jumped directly into version 3 with this 3.0 release. So, excuse us as we reach for our Reese’s Pieces to lure you home to what 3.0 offers for your API Management needs.
We have a lot in store for you with this release, including major GraphQL support, improved analytics, simplified policies and keys, weight-based load balancing, a brand new look to our Tyk Dashboard and more.
You may wonder, with the jump of 2.9 to 3.0, if we’ve made any breaking changes. We answer that with a resounding “no!” We have a promise to you to give you extensive notice before making breaking changes to our APIs. We’ve maintained backwards compatibility since v2.0 and we intend to continue doing so. We are also introducing Long Term Support (LTS) releases, so every major release will be supported for one year.
Before we get into all the new features, let’s go Back to the Future when we released 2.9, where we expanded capabilities, improved performance, made the dashboard easier to use and added security features.
And we couldn’t hold our excitement, so we shared a few upgrades we implemented along the way, which included important new flows in team management and subscription to APIs.
We have so much more in store for you in this release. So, let’s lift our bicycles to the sky and soar across the moon, to see all the intergalactic API magic 3.0 offers.
Prefer technical jargon over the highlights? Read our release notes, or carry on for our pick of the latest features.
“I’ve never driven Analytics 3.0 before!”
We heard your requests on improving analytics data on the dashboard, so we’ve ventured one step forward to improve the entire experience. We enhanced analytics capabilities, so you now have more granular analytics data on your APIs’ usage.
Beyond aggregate data, you can now see analytics for specific versions of APIs or API categories within the same chart. If you were looking for more data about errors, we’ve updated that too, to show you the error date, type, and which specific API triggered that error.
In a tenant environment, each organisation, team or environment might have their preferred analytics tooling. Prior to this release, we sent all analytics to the same databases. Our new capability allows you to share those analytics to different data-sinks and filter out any sensitive fields, keeping all your analytics internal, while ensuring any sensitive data is stripped before sending to a SaaS Analytics provider.
If that wasn’t enough, we also enhanced detailed logging for individual keys and APIs. Now instead of enabling it globally, which we know can cause enormous overheads on big traffic, you can enable it for a single key, or specific API.
“Elliott, that machine. What does it do?” It must be a new identity broker!
Previously you had to run a separate process to set up Single Sign-On (SSO). Well, that’s no longer the case. This functionality got a UI revamp and is now available directly in your dashboard! You can set up your SSO flow with just a few clicks in the UI.
“Well, I’m, um, reorganizing.”: Streamlining our UI & UX
We have a brand new look to our dashboard. About half a year ago, we made some changes to our visual branding to better express our love for creativity and UX. Those changes started with our website and now we are also incorporating these visual changes into the UI of our products. We do this to keep our brand consistent across the whole Tyk experience and to enhance your experience using our products.
We have a lot to update you on with our UX & UI revamp, but one thing we want to highlight here is the update to policies and keys. We know there was confusion in the way we set policies and keys up in the Tyk dashboard, so we redesigned the UI to make it less error-prone, simpler and more intuitive when you create, view and edit Security Policies and Keys.
“35 pounds?” You need weight load balancing!
You can now perform A/B tests & canary deployments of your APIs and services. You can send 20% of traffic to one upstream, with 80% going to another upstream service. Similarly, if caches require warming, then we can send a low percentage of traffic to these services, and, when confident that they can handle the load, you can begin incrementally sending more.
“You could be happy here, I could take care of you…And give you all the GraphQL support you need!”
That’s right! We’re delighted to announce that the Tyk Open Source Gateway now supports GraphQL, Tyk now has a Graph QL resolver built in to allow composition of your own Graph, and we’ve gone further and added powerful GraphQL tooling into the dashboard to make it really quick and simple to use. Find out more about what a Universal Data Graph can mean for your organisation here!
I taught him how to talk. He can talk now…And telling us all the other cool new features in this release, like:
- We’ve removed the dependency on Redis by dynamically disabling functionality which depends on Redis, like rate limits or quotas, when Redis is unavailable. We’ll re-enable it back once Redis is available.
- Now you can apply global header transformations for the responses.
- We’ve enhanced the Gateway health check API. You can configure notifications based on new data about the health of the dashboard, Redis, and MDCB connections.
- New response plugins are now available. We now expose a response hook to the middleware chain, allowing you to transform, inspect or obfuscate parts of the response body or response headers.
- Concerned that clients are getting a 404 response? Could it be that the API definition or URL rewrites have been mis-configured? Telling Tyk to track 404 logs will cause Tyk Gateway to split some errors showing that a particular resource has not been found.
- Want to reference secrets from a KV store in your API definitions? We now have native Vault & Consul integration. You can even pull from a Tyk configuration dictionary or environment variable file.
Well, I guess that’s all for now. If you want more details on the features we talked about today, head over to our release notes.
Download Tyk 3.0 and have absolute power! Eerp!…
On Tyk Cloud? You don’t have to do anything. The Gateway and Dashboard will update automatically.
Running Tyk Multicloud or running On-Premises? The release is available right away via packages and Docker. Head over to the Upgrade Guide and follow the instructions.
Not using Tyk yet? What are you waiting for? Get started on Tyk now.
And stay safe!
