Kong

Open-source API gateway and platform for managing, securing, and connecting APIs and microservices across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Delivers a lightweight, cloud-native proxy that sits in front of backend services to handle authentication, rate limiting, transformations, and observability in one layer.

Kong is trusted by hundreds of enterprises including United Airlines, Goldman Sachs, Siemens, and H&M. It differentiates from alternatives like NGINX or AWS API Gateway by offering a plugin-based architecture with hundreds of extensions, native Kubernetes integration via the Ingress Controller, and a full platform that extends from REST APIs to AI and event streaming. The project reports billions of API calls processed daily with a large community and extensive documentation.

Key capabilities:

• Lightweight, high-performance API gateway built on NGINX and Lua
• Extensible plugin ecosystem for authentication, rate limiting, logging, and request transformation
• Kubernetes Ingress Controller and Kong Mesh for service mesh deployments
• AI Gateway and Event Gateway for LLM routing and Kafka governance
• Developer portal, observability, and usage-based metering
• Deployment flexibility across cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments

Organizations use Kong to centralize API security and rate limiting, route traffic between microservices, and expose internal APIs to partners or public consumers. Developers integrate it into CI/CD and GitOps workflows for declarative API configuration. Teams building AI applications can route LLM traffic through Kong for cost governance and consistent policy enforcement across multiple providers.