We recently sat down to discuss the language for the next Kong Gateway Plugin Development Kit (PDK). Given the number of JavaScript developers in the world and the variety of libraries and debugging tools available, there was only one logical choice. I’m excited to share that with the Kong Gateway (OSS) 2.4 release, that functionality is now available to you all!

This tutorial will walk through a common use case for the Kong Gateway Key Authentication plugin: using API key authentication to protect a route to an API server endpoint. It’s a simple use case, but it will give you the foundation to deploy and configure the plugin for your own unique project needs. Before we walk through our mini-project, let’s cover a few core concepts.

One of the most powerful capabilities provided by Kong Konnect Enterprise is the support for Hybrid deployments. In other words, it implements distributed API Gateway Clusters with multiple instances running on several environments at the same time. Moreover, Kong Enterprise provides a new topology option, named Hybrid Mode, with a total separation of the Control Plane (CP) and Data Plane (DP).

We looked at service design considerations in the first part of this blog series. In this next part, I’d like to share some best practices for API versioning – a topic that comes up quite often with every customer as it is one of the key concerns when implementing API gateways. There are two ways to version RESTful APIs: URI and header-based, as summarized in this REST API tutorial.

Containerization and orchestration are becoming increasingly popular. According to a recent survey conducted by Market Watch, the global container market will exceed $5 billion by 2026. In 2019, that number was under 1 billion. These statistics show that the world is moving more towards containers and orchestration faster and faster each day. One example of this is moving from VM to Kubernetes.

The Kong Gateway Rate Limiting plugin is one of our most popular traffic control add-ons. You can configure the plugin with a policy for what constitutes “similar requests” (requests coming from the same IP address, for example), and you can set your limits (limit to 10 requests per minute, for example). This tutorial will walk through how simple it is to enable rate limiting in your Kong Gateway.

Note to readers before we get started: you’ll see us referring to the “Kong Gateway” in this post. This is the product previously referred to as Kong Gateway Enterprise. In version 2.3, we released a free operating mode of Kong Gateway Enterprise, and given it no longer needs a paid “Enterprise” license, we now refer to this gateway as the Kong Gateway and disambiguate from the OSS-only Gateway as Kong Gateway (OSS).