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How Kong Gateway works

Kong API gateway / reverse proxy (self-hosted or Kong Konnect). Routes requests to upstream services with authentication, rate limiting, and other plugins. A popular non-AWS alternative to API Gateway.

Every API needs the same boring things in front of it: authentication, rate limiting, routing, logging. Build them into each service and you repeat yourself forever. Kong is a gateway that handles all of it in one layer, with a plugin for each concern, and it runs wherever you do, not just on one cloud.

What you will learn

What job does an API gateway do that belongs in front of your services?
How does Kong route and protect traffic as a reverse proxy?
What is the plugin model, and why is it the heart of Kong?
How does Kong compare with AWS API Gateway?

One front door for many services

Kong is an API gateway and reverse proxy. Clients talk to Kong, and Kong forwards each request to the right upstream service. That single entry point is where you enforce policy once instead of in every service.

Plugins do the cross-cutting work

Kong's power is its plugins. Authentication (keys, OAuth, JWT), rate limiting, request and response transformation, logging, and metrics are all plugins you enable per route or service, no code in the services themselves.

⚓ Microservice platforms unifying auth and rate limits, exposing internal APIs to partners, and teams that want gateway features without coupling to one cloud provider.

Self-hosted or managed Konnect

You can run Kong's data-plane nodes yourself, on VMs, containers, or Kubernetes, behind a load balancer, or use Kong Konnect, the managed SaaS where Kong runs the control plane. Either way the proxying happens in nodes you can place close to your services.

Kong vs AWS API Gateway

Both front your APIs with auth, throttling, and routing. AWS API Gateway is fully managed and deeply tied into AWS (IAM, Lambda, CloudWatch). Kong is cloud-portable: the same gateway runs on AWS, another cloud, or on-prem, which matters for multi-cloud or avoiding lock-in.

Flashcards

What role does Kong play in an architecture?: An API gateway / reverse proxy: one front door that routes to upstream services and enforces policy once.
How does Kong add auth, rate limiting, and logging?: As plugins enabled per route or service, so the upstream services need no code changes for those concerns.
What are the two ways to run Kong?: Self-hosted data-plane nodes (VMs/containers/K8s) or managed Kong Konnect. Throughput scales with node count.
Kong vs AWS API Gateway, the core difference?: API Gateway is AWS-managed and AWS-coupled; Kong is cloud-portable and runs anywhere, with a rich plugin ecosystem.
What does Kong call the services it forwards to?: Upstreams. Kong receives client requests and proxies them to the matching upstream service.

Sources

Open the SysPad canvas · Official Kong Gateway documentation