Kong Gateway
🦍 The API and AI Gateway observed · 2026-08-28
Health v2 · maintenance only
91/100
- Activity 98
- Release rhythm 77
- Longevity 100
How is this computed?
round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10) — computed 2026-09-03. Adoption (stars, forks) is never an input.
- gap_med: 68
- age_days: 4307
- days_rel: 77
- days_push: 17
- n_releases_24m: 6
Adoption not part of the score
44045 stars · 5205 forks observed · 2026-08-28
What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded
Kong Gateway is a cloud-native, high-performance API gateway that proxies, routes, load-balances, and secures API, LLM, and MCP traffic, extensible via a large plugin ecosystem. It runs on Kubernetes via its official Ingress Controller and supports DB-less, Docker, and hybrid deployments.
Use cases
- manage and secure microservices API traffic
- add authentication and rate limiting to APIs
- proxy and route requests to multiple LLM providers
- secure and observe MCP (Model Context Protocol) traffic
- run an API gateway on Kubernetes with an ingress controller
- load balance and health check upstream services
- self-host an OpenAI-compatible AI gateway
When to choose
- you need a battle-tested, plugin-extensible gateway for API, LLM, or MCP traffic
- you run microservices on Kubernetes and need ingress plus API management
- you want multi-LLM routing, semantic security, and AI traffic analytics in one layer
- you need cloud-native deployments (Docker, Helm, DB-less, hybrid) with strong observability
When to avoid
- you need only a simple lightweight reverse proxy without API management features
- your stack is not cloud/container-oriented and you want a minimal footprint
- you require a fully managed SaaS gateway and prefer not to operate infrastructure (consider Kong Konnect instead)
- you need a gateway in a language other than Lua/OpenResty or want deep customization outside its plugin model
Facets
service · maturity stable
api-gateway proxy routing auth rate-limiting middleware load-testing mcp llm-inference monitoring security apis microservices large-language-models cloud-computing self-hosted security networking self-hosted cloud api-management reverse-proxy ai-gateway llm-gateway mcp-gateway kubernetes-ingress plugin-system openai-proxy cloud-native lua ai-agents devops containers kubernetes docker linux web-server
10 sources
- readme: https://github.com/Kong/kong · fetched 2026-08-28 · 1ff24b1c93f2
- homepage: https://konghq.com/install/ · fetched 2026-08-29 · 447f981b5e5e
- site_page: https://developer.konghq.com/gateway/install/docker · fetched 2026-08-29 · c80081e43edc
- site_page: https://developer.konghq.com/gateway/install/docker-read-only · fetched 2026-08-29 · 43cbf3932c25
- site_page: https://developer.konghq.com/gateway/install/docker-distroless · fetched 2026-08-29 · d74414988ab7
- site_page: https://developer.konghq.com/gateway/install/kubernetes/konnect · fetched 2026-08-29 · 2f80ce3afb31
- site_page: https://developer.konghq.com/operator/get-started/gateway-api/install · fetched 2026-08-29 · 69c84b01748b
- site_page: https://developer.konghq.com/kubernetes-ingress-controller/install · fetched 2026-08-29 · 277f15920482
- site_page: https://konghq.com/pricing · fetched 2026-08-29 · 2eb8a3715313
- site_page: https://developer.konghq.com/sitemap · fetched 2026-08-29 · 025372822e1b
Member repositories
| Repository | Role | Health v2 |
|---|---|---|
| Kong/kong | main | 91 |
| Kong/kubernetes-ingress-controller | plugin | 98 |
| Kong/docker-kong | infra | 82 |
For agents
Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00 · Report a problem