Kong: API Gateway from Zero to Hero

In this course, you will learn Kong, Kong API Gateway is a powerful tool for managing APIs in a microservices architecture. Here are some common use cases for Kong API Gateway and things we are going to cover in this course.

• Installing Kong: Installing Kong via Docker

• Interacting with Kong via Konga: Open-Source GUI to Kong Admin API

• Interacting Kong via REST API: create services, Routes, Consumers, and plugins in Kong via REST APIs.

• Microservices Abstraction: It acts as a single entry point for all backend services, simplifying the development, deployment, and management of systems.

• Security and Authentication: Kong can manage security concerns like SSL/TLS termination, OAuth2.0, JWT, API keys, and more, ensuring secure access to your services.

• Traffic Control: With features like rate limiting, request size limiting, and circuit breakers, Kong helps control the traffic flow to your services.

• Analytics and Monitoring: Kong provides real-time analytics and monitoring capabilities, allowing you to track API performance and usage patterns.

• AI Gateway with Multi-LLM Support: This allows developers who want to integrate one or more LLMs into their products to be more productive and ship AI capabilities faster while offering a solution to architects and platform teams that ensures visibility, control, and compliance on every AI request sent by the teams. And because it’s built on top of Kong Gateway, it will be possible to orchestrate AI flows in the cloud or on self-hosted LLMs with the best performance and the lowest latency, which are critical in AI-based applications.

• High Availability: Kong supports clustering for high availability, ensuring that the API gateway remains operational even if some nodes fail.

• Load Balancing: It can distribute incoming API traffic across multiple backend services, improving performance and reliability.

• Request and Response Transformations: Kong can modify requests and responses on the fly, such as adding, removing, or modifying headers.

• Decoupling: By decoupling the client-facing API endpoints from the underlying microservice architecture, Kong allows for seamless updates and changes to the services without affecting the clients.

• Extending Kong via Creating Custom Plugins in Lua: Creating custom plugins in Lua for Kong API Gateway allows you to extend its functionality to suit your specific needs.

• Learn Lua (Optional): We are going to learn Lua Programming Language.