What is Kong Gateway?
Kong is an API and AI connectivity platform designed to secure, manage, and monetize traffic from APIs, LLMs, MCPs, and real-time events. It serves as a unified platform for orchestrating context and governing access across various digital assets. The platform aims to unify AI cost, security, and risk management.
Why use it in the API Lifecycle?
- Agentic AI Management: Build and test AI agents, connecting them with intelligence and enterprise context using pre-built policies. This includes optimizing token consumption and standardizing agent resilience and access control.
- API Lifecycle Management: Manage the entire API lifecycle, from design and testing to publishing and monetization. This feature supports reducing API onboarding time, driving API reuse, and enforcing security policies.
- Event Stream Governance: Standardize the integration of agents and applications with real-time data streams. This includes facilitating self-serve access to data and offloading authentication, encryption, and failover to the Gateway.
- Usage-based Billing and Monetization: Optimize token consumption and monetize the use of intelligence and context by launching pricing changes, setting entitlements, and enforcing limits at runtime.
- Developer Productivity Tools: Design, test, and produce agentic workflows by packaging digital assets for consumption. This includes self-serve API and MCP discovery and testing for quality, security, and resilience.
Best Practices
- Use declarative configuration files (Kong decK) to version your gateway routing configurations alongside your source code.
