Introduction to Kong Gateway

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0200

Kong Gateway is an API Gateway built on NGINX and developed in Lua. It acts as the entry point between API consumers and backend services, playing the role of an advanced reverse proxy with powerful capabilities for managing, securing, and observing traffic.

Its purpose goes far beyond forwarding requests. Some of the native capabilities it provides are:

Authentication and authorization through mechanisms such as API Keys, JWT, Basic Auth, or OIDC.
Traffic control through rate limiting policies, quotas, and allow lists.
Request and response transformations without changing the applications.
Event, metric, and trace logging to improve observability.
Centralized exposure of multiple services through a single entry point.

Thanks to this approach, APIs can focus exclusively on business logic while Kong Gateway takes care of common concerns such as security, traffic control, observability, and communication handling.

Installing Kong Ingress Controller (KIC)

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0200

In this article, we will move from theory to a real deployment. The goal is to install Kong Ingress Controller (KIC) in a Kubernetes cluster, verify that Kong Gateway is working properly, and prepare the external exposure of the proxy so that we can publish applications from the cluster itself.

To keep the lab simple, I will use a single virtual machine created with Vagrant on which I will run a k3s cluster. This choice does not change the way Kong works, but it allows us to focus on what really matters: what KIC installs, why the proxy service initially appears in Pending, and how to solve that with MetalLB.

API Gateway on Atlas

Introduction to Kong Gateway

Installing Kong Ingress Controller (KIC)