Kong Consulting

Kong is an open-source API gateway and service mesh used to route, secure, and observe traffic between clients and microservices. It is commonly used by platform, DevOps, and application teams to standardize API access, enforce consistent policies, and reduce operational overhead in distributed architectures.

Kong is often deployed on Kubernetes and supports cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments, making it useful for shared platform patterns and multi-team API governance. It can also complement broader Platform Engineering efforts focused on reliable, self-service delivery.

• Request routing and load balancing for north-south and east-west traffic
• Authentication, authorization, and policy enforcement through plugins
• Rate limiting, quotas, and traffic shaping to protect upstream services
• Observability integrations for logs, metrics, and distributed tracing
• Centralized management of API standards and lifecycle controls

Here are some reasons to use tools in the service mesh category:

• Simplifies the management of networking infrastructure in a distributed system.
• Provides advanced security features such as traffic monitoring and encryption.
• Enables features like service discovery, load balancing, and traffic routing.
• Enhances observability through detailed metrics and monitoring capabilities.
• Increases resilience by enabling fault tolerance and handling network disruptions seamlessly.
• Facilitates the adoption of microservices architecture and helps in deploying them at scale.
• Offers platform independence and works with various languages and platforms.
• Reduces development and maintenance costs by abstracting away the underlying infrastructure.

Kong is an open-source API gateway and service mesh used to control, secure, and observe traffic between clients and microservices. It is commonly adopted to standardize API management and enforce consistent policies across Kubernetes, cloud, and hybrid environments.

• Centralizes API ingress with consistent routing, transforms, and policy enforcement across many services.
• Improves security with built-in authentication and authorization patterns, including JWT, OAuth2, and mTLS.
• Protects upstream services using rate limiting, request size limits, and IP allow/deny controls.
• Supports modern traffic management needs such as path and host based routing, canary releases, and blue green rollouts.
• Extends functionality through plugins, enabling teams to add policies and integrations without changing application code.
• Works well in Kubernetes with Ingress Controller support, enabling GitOps friendly configuration and automated rollout workflows.
• Enables better reliability with health checks, retries, timeouts, and circuit breaker style controls when paired with service mesh capabilities.
• Improves observability by exposing metrics, logs, and traces integrations for monitoring and troubleshooting API latency and errors.
• Scales to high throughput API traffic with a lightweight data plane and options for distributed deployments.
• Fits hybrid and multi-cloud architectures, helping enforce consistent governance across different clusters and environments.

Kong is a strong fit when teams need a single control point for API governance plus a path toward service-to-service policy enforcement. Key trade-offs include operational complexity at scale, plugin governance, and deciding how to split responsibilities between gateway and mesh to avoid duplicated policies.

Common alternatives include NGINX, Apigee, and Istio, depending on whether the priority is API management, gateway performance, or service mesh depth. For more on API gateway concepts, see Kong in the CNCF landscape.

Our experience with Kong helped us build repeatable patterns, automation, and operational runbooks for managing API traffic and microservices securely across Kubernetes and hybrid environments. Through delivery work, we refined how we design gateway topologies, enforce policies, and operate Kong reliably under real production load.

Some of the things we did include:

• Implemented Kong Gateway in Kubernetes with GitOps-driven configuration, standardizing routes, services, plugins, and environment promotion across dev/stage/prod.
• Designed high-availability deployments with horizontal scaling, health checks, and safe upgrade paths to reduce downtime during Kong version and plugin changes.
• Integrated Kong with Kubernetes Ingress and service discovery, aligning gateway ownership boundaries with platform and application teams.
• Hardened API security using mTLS, JWT/OIDC validation, rate limiting, IP allow/deny policies, and WAF-style controls, with auditable configuration and change history.
• Established observability for Kong using Prometheus metrics, structured logging, and tracing pipelines to speed up incident response and capacity planning.
• Built CI/CD pipelines that linted and tested Kong declarative config, validated plugin compatibility, and automated rollouts with rollback strategies.
• Migrated legacy API gateways and NGINX-based edge routing into Kong, rationalizing routes and policies while minimizing breaking changes for client teams.
• Implemented traffic management patterns such as canary releases, header-based routing, and request/response transformations to support safer microservice releases.
• Optimized performance and cost by tuning worker processes, connection pooling, caching, and plugin usage based on real request profiles and latency SLOs.
• Delivered enablement sessions and on-call handover documentation so client teams could operate Kong confidently, including troubleshooting playbooks and upgrade checklists.

This experience helped us accumulate significant knowledge across multiple Kong use-cases, from platform standardization to security and observability in production. It enables MeteorOps to deliver high-quality Kong setups that are maintainable, scalable, and aligned with how teams actually ship and operate microservices.

Some of the things we can help you do with Kong include:

• Run an API gateway and service mesh assessment, producing a prioritized findings report for reliability, security, and operability.
• Create an adoption roadmap for standardizing API governance across teams, environments, and Kubernetes/hybrid deployments.
• Design and implement Kong gateway architecture, including routing, services, consumers, and plugin strategy aligned to your platform standards.
• Harden security with authentication/authorization, mTLS, rate limiting, WAF-style controls, and policy guardrails for compliance.
• Automate Kong configuration with Infrastructure as Code and GitOps workflows, integrating with CI/CD for repeatable deployments.
• Establish observability for API traffic (metrics, logs, tracing), SLOs, and dashboards to reduce MTTR and operational risk.
• Optimize performance and cost through caching, timeouts, connection tuning, autoscaling patterns, and capacity planning.
• Troubleshoot production issues such as latency, 5xx errors, plugin conflicts, and upstream instability with structured runbooks.
• Build operational runbooks and on-call practices for upgrades, incident response, and safe configuration changes.
• Enable teams with hands-on training and reference patterns for secure API publishing, versioning, and lifecycle management.

Learn more about our platform engineering approach on MeteorOps.