Kong Technology Intelligence

What is Kong?

Kong is a cloud-native, platform-agnostic API gateway that provides traffic management, authentication, rate limiting, and analytics for APIs and microservices. Built on Nginx, Kong offers high performance with extensive plugin ecosystem for extending functionality.

Kong can operate as a traditional API gateway, Kubernetes ingress controller, or service mesh component. It supports both plugin-based and declarative configuration, allowing flexible deployment patterns from simple API management to complex service mesh scenarios.

Detection of Kong indicates API-first infrastructure, commonly found in organizations with microservices architectures, API products, and environments requiring centralized API management, authentication, and traffic control.

Kong Features

Traffic Control: Load balancing. Request routing. Rate limiting. Request/response transformation.

Authentication: OAuth 2.0. JWT. Key authentication. LDAP. OpenID Connect. mTLS.

Plugins: 100+ plugins. Custom plugin development. Lua extensibility. Marketplace.

Analytics: Request logging. Metrics collection. Prometheus integration. Detailed analytics.

Service Mesh: Kong Mesh. Kuma integration. mTLS. Service discovery. Traffic policies.

Admin API: RESTful API. Declarative configuration. Infrastructure as code. GitOps support.

Kong Use Cases

API Gateway: API management. Authentication. Rate limiting. Request transformation. Monitoring.

Kubernetes Ingress: Kong Ingress Controller. Service routing. TLS termination. Traffic management.

Microservices: Service communication. Discovery. Load balancing. Circuit breaking.

Partner APIs: API monetization. Developer portals. Usage analytics. Access control.

Legacy Modernization: API facade. Protocol translation. Request routing. Migration support.

Multi-Cloud: Hybrid deployments. Cloud-agnostic. Consistent policies. Unified management.

Kong Configuration Examples

Declarative Configuration

_format_version: "3.0"

services:
  - name: user-service
    url: http://user-service:3000
    routes:
      - name: user-route
        paths:
          - /api/users
        strip_path: true
    plugins:
      - name: rate-limiting
        config:
          minute: 100
          hour: 1000
      - name: jwt
        config:
          secret_is_base64: false
          claims_to_verify:
            - exp

Admin API Usage

# Add a service
curl -X POST http://kong:8001/services \
  --data name=myservice \
  --data url=http://backend:8080

# Add rate limiting plugin
curl -X POST http://kong:8001/services/myservice/plugins \
  --data name=rate-limiting \
  --data config.minute=100

Kong Benefits

Performance: Nginx-based. Low latency. High throughput. Efficient processing.

Extensibility: Rich plugin ecosystem. Custom plugins. Lua extensibility. Active marketplace.

Platform Agnostic: Any cloud. On-premises. Kubernetes. VM. Hybrid deployments.

Open Source: Free open-source version. Enterprise features available. Transparent development.

API Management: Complete lifecycle. Developer portal. Analytics. Monetization.

Cloud Native: Kubernetes native. Declarative config. GitOps friendly. Modern architecture.