Introduction to Kong Gateway

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.