kong
🦍 The API and AI Gateway
free(Free tier)44.1k github stars
About kong
Kong or Kong Gateway is a cloud-native, platform-agnostic, scalable API 𖧹 LLM 𖧹 MCP Gateway distinguished for its high performance and extensibility via plugins. It also provides advanced AI traffic capabilities with multi-LLM support, semantic security, MCP traffic security and analytics, and more.
By providing functionality for proxying, routing, load balancing, health checking, authentication (and more), Kong serves as the central layer for orchestrating microservices or conventional API traffic - and agentic LLM and MCP as well - with ease.
Kong runs natively on Kubernetes thanks to its official Kubernetes Ingress Controller.
Key Features
- Advanced routing, load balancing, health checking - all configurable via a RESTful admin API or declarative configuration.
- Authentication and authorization for APIs using methods like JWT, basic auth, OAuth, ACLs and more.
- Universal LLM API to route across multiple providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, GCP Gemini, AWS Bedrock, Azure AI, Databricks, Mistral, Huggingface and more.
- MCP traffic governance, MCP security and MCP observability in addition to MCP autogeneration from any RESTful API.
- 60+ AI features like AI observability, semantic security and caching, semantic routing and more.
- Proxy, SSL/TLS termination, and connectivity support for L4 or L7 traffic.
- Plugins for enforcing traffic controls, rate limiting, req/res transformations, logging, monitoring and including a plugin developer hub.
- Sophisticated deployment models like Declarative Databaseless Deployment and Hybrid Deployment (control plane/data plane separation) without any vendor lock-in.