Kong

Kong is an open-source, cloud-native API and AI gateway used for managing traffic, routing, and LLM orchestration. It acts as a central layer for orchestrating microservices, conventional API traffic, and agentic LLM and MCP traffic. The software is platform-agnostic and can be deployed on bare metal, in containers via Docker, or natively on Kubernetes using an official Ingress Controller. It is designed to handle high-performance traffic while remaining extensible through a wide array of plugins.

Users can configure the gateway through a RESTful admin API, a management web UI called Kong Manager, or via declarative configuration tools like decK. It supports various deployment models to fit different infrastructure needs, including a database-less mode for simplified setups and a hybrid model that separates the control plane from the data plane to prevent vendor lock-in. This flexibility allows the gateway to scale across diverse environments from local development to large cloud clusters.

Key features

• Advanced routing, load balancing, and health checking
• Authentication and authorization via JWT, basic auth, OAuth, and ACLs
• Universal LLM API for routing across providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, and GCP Gemini
• MCP traffic governance, security, and observability
• Semantic security, semantic routing, and AI caching
• SSL/TLS termination and connectivity support for L4 and L7 traffic
• Rate limiting, request/response transformations, and logging via plugins
• Native Kubernetes Ingress Controller support

Kong is built for DevOps teams and engineers managing complex microservice architectures or AI integrations. Its extensibility is driven by a plugin system, allowing developers to build custom functionality using Lua, Go, or JavaScript. The gateway integrates with various cloud providers and supports a wide range of LLM backends, including AWS Bedrock, Azure AI, Databricks, and Mistral. By centralizing these common API and AI functions, it allows engineering teams to focus on core application logic rather than infrastructure plumbing.

This software serves as a scalable infrastructure component for organizations requiring centralized traffic control, security enforcement, and AI gateway capabilities.