Kong Gateway

Kong Gateway is a cloud-native, platform-agnostic gateway for managing API traffic at the edge of your services. It provides high-performance proxying, routing, and policy enforcement, and extends functionality through a large ecosystem of plugins.

Key Features

• Reverse proxy and routing for L7 traffic, with load balancing and active health checks
• Centralized authentication and authorization using plugins (for example JWT, OAuth 2.0, and ACL-based policies)
• Rate limiting, request/response transformations, and traffic controls via plugins
• Admin API for configuration and automation, plus support for declarative configuration (DB-less mode)
• Observability integrations and export of gateway telemetry via OpenTelemetry-compatible tooling
• Kubernetes-native operation via official ingress controller integration

Use Cases

• Secure and manage microservices APIs with a centralized gateway layer
• Standardize authentication, rate limiting, and request transformations across multiple services
• Operate an ingress/gateway layer for Kubernetes workloads with consistent policies

Limitations and Considerations

• Some capabilities advertised on the vendor site may be specific to enterprise or hosted offerings rather than the open-source edition

Kong Gateway is a strong fit for teams that need a scalable, extensible API gateway with broad plugin support and modern cloud-native deployment options. It helps centralize cross-cutting concerns like security, traffic management, and observability for API-driven systems.