Kong Gateway
Kong Gateway is an open-source API gateway built on top of Nginx and OpenResty, used to manage, secure, and route traffic to APIs and microservices.
Definition
Kong Gateway is an open-source API gateway built on top of Nginx and OpenResty, used to manage, secure, and route traffic to APIs and microservices.
Overview
Kong Gateway sits between clients and backend services, handling cross-cutting concerns so individual microservices don't need to reimplement them: authentication and authorization (including OAuth and API key validation), rate limiting, request/response transformation, logging, and traffic routing to the correct upstream service. It is built on Nginx and OpenResty (Nginx plus Lua scripting), which gives it high throughput and a plugin architecture for extending behavior. Kong's plugin ecosystem is central to its design — capabilities like authentication schemes, rate limiting strategies, request logging, and traffic control are implemented as plugins that can be enabled per API or per consumer, rather than being hardcoded into the gateway core. Kong Inc. also offers Kong Konnect, a hosted control plane for managing distributed Kong gateways, along with Kong Mesh for service mesh use cases. As organizations move from monolithic applications to microservices, an API gateway like Kong becomes the single entry point that clients talk to, decoupling client-facing API contracts from the internal service topology and centralizing policy enforcement that would otherwise be duplicated across services.
Key Features
- Built on Nginx and OpenResty for high-throughput request handling
- Plugin architecture for authentication, rate limiting, logging, and transformations
- Centralized routing to microservices and backend APIs
- Support for OAuth, API keys, and other authentication schemes via plugins
- Declarative and database-backed configuration modes
- Kong Konnect hosted control plane for managing distributed gateway deployments