Kong

Kong is a cloud-native API gateway and platform built on top of Nginx (specifically OpenResty). It is deployed in front of backend microservices to act as a single, controllable entry point for all API traffic. Its core function is to provide a comprehensive security and management layer, handling tasks like authentication (OAuth2, JWT), authorization, rate limiting, and traffic transformation via a “plugin” architecture. By intercepting and proxying all requests, Kong also provides critical observability metrics, logs, and traces for monitoring API performance.