Kong

Kong Gateway acts as a central proxy for API, AI, and MCP traffic, handling routing, load balancing, health checking, and authentication through a RESTful admin API or declarative configuration. It supports a wide range of auth methods such as JWT, OAuth, basic auth and ACLs, and can route requests to multiple LLM providers including OpenAI, Anthropic, and AWS Bedrock. The platform also offers MCP governance, security, observability, and automatic generation from RESTful APIs, together with over sixty AI‑specific features like semantic routing and caching.

The software is self‑hostable, open‑source under Apache‑2.0, and can be deployed on bare metal, containers, or Kubernetes via an official Ingress Controller. Installation options include Docker, DB‑less mode, and traditional database‑backed setups, with a web UI (Kong Manager) and command‑line tools for management. It is designed for hybrid and multi‑cloud environments and aims to provide a lightweight, high‑performance NGINX‑based engine capable of handling tens of thousands of transactions per second.

Target users are developers and engineering teams that need a scalable, extensible gateway for microservice architectures, API‑first applications, or AI‑enabled services. The plugin system allows custom extensions, and the platform integrates with CI/CD pipelines for automated configuration and lifecycle management.