Kong Gateway

Kong Gateway is an Apache 2.0-licensed API gateway from Kong Inc. that also handles LLM and MCP traffic. It proxies and routes requests, load balances, health checks and authenticates traffic, and it is extended through plugins. It can run on Linux packages, Docker, or Kubernetes, or be used through Kong's hosted Konnect platform.

What It Is

Kong Gateway is a platform-agnostic gateway that sits in front of microservices and conventional APIs as a central traffic layer. The README also positions it for agentic traffic, with multi-LLM support, semantic security, and MCP traffic security and analytics. Configuration is done through a RESTful Admin API, declarative configuration, decK, or the Kong Manager web UI.

AI and MCP Traffic

According to the README, a universal LLM API routes across providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, GCP Gemini, AWS Bedrock, Azure AI, Databricks, Mistral and Hugging Face. It lists MCP governance, security and observability, plus MCP autogeneration from any RESTful API. It also lists 60+ AI features including AI observability, semantic security and caching, and semantic routing.

Deployment and Extensibility

Kong supports declarative DB-less deployment and hybrid deployment with control plane and data plane separation. It handles SSL/TLS termination and L4 or L7 connectivity. Plugins cover rate limiting, request and response transformation, logging, monitoring and authentication such as JWT, basic auth, OAuth and ACLs. Plugins can be written in Lua, Go or JavaScript, and a Plugin Hub showcases Kong and community plugins.

Setup Path

The install docs provide Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat and Amazon Linux packages, Docker images (including a distroless image), and Helm or Kong Operator installs on Kubernetes. The Kong Ingress Controller configures the gateway with Kubernetes resources such as Ingress and HTTPRoute. The docs state there is no native Windows install, and Docker is the route on Windows. A quick-start in the README uses the docker-kong compose stack, exposing ports 8000 (proxy), 8001 (Admin API) and 8002 (Kong Manager).

Commercial Konnect Option

Kong Inc. also offers Konnect, a SaaS control plane that adds analytics, a service catalog and developer portals, with commercial support.