Kong

Freemium

konghq.com

Cloud-native API gateway and service connectivity platform built for ultra-fast traffic management, microservices routing, and security.

About Kong

Kong is the world's most popular cloud-native API gateway and service management platform, built on top of high-performance NGINX and OpenResty architectures. Designed to mediate and secure traffic between modern microservices, mobile apps, and distributed cloud applications, Kong processes millions of transactions per second with sub-millisecond latencies.

The platform features Kong AI Gateway, enabling organizations to integrate, govern, and monitor generative AI large language model APIs seamlessly. Kong AI Gateway adds centralized rate limiting, prompt routing, credential masking, and automated token cost tracking across diverse model providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cohere through a standardized proxy layer.

Kong offers an open-source core alongside Kong Konnect, an enterprise SaaS control plane that manages hybrid runtime instances across any cloud or Kubernetes cluster. It provides a free community edition as well as commercial enterprise subscriptions equipped with advanced security plugins, role-based governance, and 24/7 support.

Key Features

Core capabilities and technical highlights of Kong

Ultra-low latency proxy engine capable of handling high-throughput API traffic with minimal CPU and memory footprints.

Dedicated Kong AI Gateway module offering prompt engineering, model failover routing, and token cost analytics.

Extensive plugin ecosystem providing instant support for authentication, rate limiting, transformations, and caching.

Hybrid SaaS control plane via Kong Konnect managing distributed data plane instances across multi-cloud environments.

Popular Use Cases

How teams, developers, and creators get value from Kong

1Route and load balance high-volume HTTP and gRPC traffic across Kubernetes microservices with sub-millisecond latency.

2Deploy Kong AI Gateway to route prompts between multiple LLM providers while tracking token consumption costs.

3Enforce standardized OAuth2 authentication, rate limiting, and CORS headers across company APIs via pluggable extensions.

4Protect sensitive internal microservices from public exposure using centralized zero-trust security policies.

Frequently Asked Questions

Common questions and answers regarding Kong

Is Kong open source?

Yes, Kong Gateway is an open-source project with an active community, while Kong Konnect and Kong Enterprise offer managed commercial capabilities.

What is Kong AI Gateway?

Kong AI Gateway is an extension of Kong that allows developers to proxy, load balance, secure, and monitor interactions with external and internal LLM models.

Can Kong run inside Kubernetes?

Yes, Kong provides a certified Kubernetes Ingress Controller that manages ingress traffic using standard Kubernetes manifests.

Which authentication methods does Kong support?

Kong supports diverse authentication mechanisms including API keys, OAuth2, JWT tokens, HMAC signatures, and OpenID Connect.

Can developers build custom plugins for Kong?

Yes, developers can create custom plugins in Lua, Go, Python, or JavaScript to modify request and response lifecycles.