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DevOps Infrastructure Microservices AI Gateway Load Balancer API Gateway Reverse Proxy

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Last Updated: 08-21-2026 05:03 AM (UTC)

Kong

With over 43,000 GitHub stars and adoption by companies including Nasdaq, Samsung, and Expedia, Kong Gateway is the world's most deployed open-source API gateway, processing billions of API requests daily across hybrid-cloud and multi-cloud architectures. Built on the battle-tested NGINX engine with OpenResty's LuaJIT runtime, Kong delivers sub-millisecond proxy latency while supporting REST, gRPC, GraphQL, WebSocket, SOAP, and Kafka protocols. The plugin architecture includes authentication via JWT, Basic Auth, HMAC, key authentication, OAuth 2.0, and LDAP, alongside rate limiting with configurable windows per consumer, IP address, or API key. The AI Proxy plugin provides a universal LLM API that routes across OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, AWS Bedrock, Azure AI, Databricks, Mistral, and Hugging Face through a single standardized interface, while MCP proxy capabilities convert REST APIs into MCP tools and provide traffic governance for AI agents. Kong supports declarative configuration via YAML for GitOps workflows, a RESTful Admin API for dynamic configuration, and decK CLI for version-controlled infrastructure-as-code management. Upstream health checking with active and passive probes enables automatic failover, and the ring balancer distributes traffic across upstream targets with consistent hashing, round-robin, or least-connections algorithms. The Kong Plugin Hub hosts over 100 community and official plugins covering logging, monitoring, transformation, security, and traffic control. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. Apache 2.0 licensed.

Kong
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Benefits

  • Sub-Millisecond API Proxy Latency
  • NGINX-based engine with LuaJIT runtime delivers consistent sub-millisecond proxy overhead while handling thousands of concurrent connections across REST, gRPC, GraphQL, and WebSocket.
  • Extensible Plugin Architecture
  • Over 100 plugins in the Plugin Hub cover authentication, rate limiting, transformation, logging, and AI governance, with custom plugins via Lua, Go, Python, or JavaScript PDK.
  • Universal AI and LLM Gateway
  • AI Proxy plugin routes to OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Bedrock, and Mistral through a single API, with MCP proxy converting REST APIs into tools for AI agent orchestration.
  • Declarative GitOps Configuration
  • YAML-based declarative configuration with decK CLI enables version-controlled infrastructure as code, while the RESTful Admin API supports dynamic runtime configuration changes.

Features

  • Multi-Protocol Support
  • Native handling of REST, gRPC, GraphQL, WebSocket, SOAP, and Kafka protocols with per-protocol plugins for authentication, rate limiting, and request transformation.
  • Load Balancing
  • Ring balancer with consistent hashing, round-robin, and least-connections algorithms distributes traffic across upstream targets with active and passive health checking.
  • Rate Limiting
  • Configurable rate limits per consumer, IP address, or API key with second, minute, hour, day, month, and year windows backed by local or Redis-based counters.
  • Authentication Plugins
  • JWT, Basic Auth, HMAC, key authentication, OAuth 2.0, and LDAP plugins secure API access with configurable credential sources and token validation strategies.
  • Request Transformation
  • Add, remove, or modify headers, query strings, and JSON body content at the gateway level before requests reach upstream services, reducing backend coupling.