An API Gateway can enhance your microservice-based application with capabilities like traffic management, load balancing, threat protection, and observability. However, before adding it to your application architecture, you need to understand the problems your application needs to address and if the product you are choosing offers those features.
Kong Gateway is one of the most popular API gateway implementations in the market today. It was built to run on decentralized architectures, leveraging GitOps practices. With Kong, you’ll be able to configure advanced routing, load balancing, request transformation, logging, monitoring, and health checking rules.
You’ll be able to easily configure authentication with popular methods like JWT and configure authorization through ACLs. It also makes it easy to proxy traffic, perform SSL/TLS termination, and supports connectivity at layer 4 and layer 7 traffic. With its vast library of plugins, Kong is built with extensibility in mind.