Kong Gateway Community (Open Source)

Kong Gateway Community is an open-source API gateway designed to provide lightweight, fast, and flexible cloud-native API management solutions. According to the vendor, it caters to companies of all sizes, from small startups to large enterprises, and is widely used by software developers, DevOps engineers, API architects, IT managers, and e-commerce companies. With its architectural flexibility and seamless integration across any cloud, platform, or protocol, Kong Gateway Community aims to empower businesses to efficiently manage and control their APIs.

Key Features

Fast, Lightweight, Cloud-Native: Kong Gateway Community is built on an ultra-lightweight NGINX engine, delivering what the vendor claims to be exceptional performance with over 50,000 transactions per second per node. It aims to ensure minimal resource consumption and maximize efficiency while seamlessly integrating with cloud environments.

End-to-End Automation: The vendor states that Kong Gateway Community enables fully automated API and microservices lifecycle management through declarative configuration. It supports DevOps and GitOps principles, allowing developers to bring applications online faster and automate each phase of the lifecycle.

Kubernetes Native: According to the vendor, Kong Gateway Community offers seamless integration with Kubernetes through the Kong Ingress Controller, simplifying the management of traffic, transformations, and observability across Kubernetes clusters. It aims to ensure zero downtime during the implementation of traffic management and transformations.

Gateway Mocking: Kong Gateway Community provides the ability to mock API gateways, allowing developers to simulate API behavior and test different scenarios without impacting the production environment. It aims to enable thorough testing and validation of API designs before deployment.

Plugin Ordering: Kong Gateway Community offers highly extensible capabilities through a wide range of out-of-the-box plugins, allowing users to exercise granular control over their API traffic. According to the vendor, users can define the order in which plugins are executed, enabling fine-grained customization of API behavior.

Federated API Management: The vendor claims that Kong Gateway Community supports federated API management, providing centralized control and visibility over APIs across multiple instances and environments. It aims to enable consistent management and governance across distributed architectures.

Workspaces provide some isolation: Kong Gateway Community offers workspaces that provide a level of isolation for different teams or projects within an organization. According to the vendor, workspaces allow teams to have separate configurations and policies, simplifying collaboration and streamlining API management.

Control planes provide strong isolation: The vendor states that Kong Gateway Community leverages control planes to provide strong isolation between different environments or instances. It aims to allow users to manage and govern APIs independently, ensuring separation of concerns and maintaining security and stability.

Data plane Resilience: Kong Gateway Community ensures high availability and resilience through its data plane architecture. According to the vendor, it uses a distributed data plane that can handle high traffic loads and automatically scales to meet demand, enabling organizations to rely on Kong Gateway Community for large volumes of API traffic without compromising performance.

Consumer Groups: Kong Gateway Community supports consumer groups, enabling fine-grained access control and permission management. According to the vendor, it allows organizations to manage and organize consumers of APIs securely and at scale.