Amazon API Gateway
Fully managed service to create, publish, and secure APIs at any scale for backend access
Kong
Cloud‑native gateway unifying APIs, LLMs, and MCP traffic
Kong Gateway delivers high‑performance API, AI, and MCP routing with extensible plugins, Kubernetes‑native ingress, and declarative deployment, enabling teams to secure, scale, and manage traffic effortlessly.
Overview
Overview
Kong Gateway is designed for developers, DevOps, and AI engineers who need a single control plane to manage traditional APIs, large language model (LLM) services, and micro‑service control plane (MCP) traffic. It offers a cloud‑native, platform‑agnostic architecture that scales from small clusters to global deployments.
Core Capabilities
The gateway provides advanced routing, load balancing, health checks, and a rich set of authentication methods (JWT, OAuth, ACLs, etc.). Its universal LLM API lets you route requests to providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, GCP Gemini, AWS Bedrock, Azure AI, and more. MCP features add traffic governance, security, and observability, while a vibrant plugin ecosystem extends functionality for rate limiting, transformations, serverless integration, and analytics.
Deployment Flexibility
Run Kong on any infrastructure: Docker‑compose for quick local testing, DB‑less declarative mode, hybrid control‑plane/data‑plane separation, or as a native Kubernetes Ingress Controller. For managed experience, Kong Konnect offers a SaaS control plane with real‑time analytics and developer portals.
Highlights
Advanced routing, load balancing, and health checking via RESTful admin API
Universal LLM API supporting multiple providers in a single gateway
MCP traffic governance, security, and observability across services
Extensible plugin hub with community and enterprise plugins
Pros
- High performance and low latency for API and AI traffic
- Extensible through a large catalog of first‑party and community plugins
- Native Kubernetes Ingress Controller for cloud‑native deployments
- Supports declarative, DB‑less, and hybrid deployment models
Considerations
- Steeper learning curve for teams unfamiliar with Lua or Kong concepts
- Complex configuration can be overwhelming for small projects
- Enterprise‑only features require a commercial Konnect subscription
- Operational overhead when managing hybrid control‑plane setups
Managed products teams compare with
When teams consider Kong, these hosted platforms usually appear on the same shortlist.
Looking for a hosted option? These are the services engineering teams benchmark against before choosing open source.
Fit guide
Great for
- Enterprises with microservice architectures needing unified API and AI routing
- Teams that require granular traffic governance and security (MCP)
- Kubernetes‑centric environments seeking native ingress capabilities
- Organizations integrating multiple LLM providers through a single endpoint
Not ideal when
- Simple static websites that only need basic reverse proxy functionality
- Teams lacking DevOps resources to manage complex gateway configurations
- Projects that prefer a non‑Lua runtime or language ecosystem
- Use cases where only a managed SaaS solution without self‑hosting is desired
How teams use it
Unified API and LLM routing
Route requests to REST APIs and multiple LLM providers through a single gateway, simplifying authentication, observability, and policy enforcement.
MCP governance for internal services
Apply traffic policies, security controls, and real‑time observability across microservices using MCP features.
Serverless function integration
Invoke AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, or other serverless workloads via plugins without custom code.
Hybrid multi‑region deployment
Separate control and data planes to achieve high availability and low latency across geographic regions.
Tech snapshot
Lua89%
Perl5%
Raku3%
Starlark1%
Shell1%
Python1%
Frequently asked questions
Can Kong run without a database?
Yes, Kong supports a declarative, DB‑less mode where configuration is provided via YAML or JSON files.
How does Kong handle multiple LLM providers?
Kong’s universal LLM API abstracts provider specifics, allowing you to route requests to OpenAI, Anthropic, GCP Gemini, AWS Bedrock, Azure AI, and others from a single endpoint.
Is Kong compatible with Kubernetes?
Kong includes a native Ingress Controller and can be deployed as a control plane or data plane within Kubernetes clusters.
What licensing governs Kong Gateway?
Kong Gateway is released under the Apache‑2.0 license.
Do I need a commercial subscription for advanced features?
Core features are open source; advanced analytics, developer portals, and managed control‑plane (Konnect) are part of Kong’s commercial offerings.
Project at a glance
Active- Stars
- 42,564
- Watchers
- 42,564
- Forks
- 5,053
LicenseApache-2.0
Repo age11 years old
Last commit2 days ago
Primary languageLua
Last synced 2 days ago