Kong

Kong (Kong Gateway) is a cloud-native, platform-agnostic API gateway built for high performance and extended through a plugin system. It sits in front of your services and handles proxying, routing, load balancing, health checking, and authentication for API and microservice traffic, acting as a central layer instead of building that logic into each individual service.

Beyond conventional API traffic, Kong also provides gateway capabilities specifically for AI workloads, including multi-LLM support, semantic security, and traffic security/analytics for MCP (Model Context Protocol) traffic. It runs natively on Kubernetes via an official Kubernetes Ingress Controller, and can also be deployed via Kong's own hosted Konnect platform if you don't want to operate it yourself.

Kong is a fit for teams that need a dedicated, pluggable gateway layer in front of many services or APIs - for routing, auth, and traffic policy - rather than handling that logic in each service or using a general-purpose reverse proxy.