Once we have developed our API, we need to expose it to the outside world. In that journey, we deploy them. But is that sufficient? Don't we need to track our API? Which clients are connecting? What is the latency of requests, and so on and so forth? There are many other post-API development steps that one should follow to make their API production grade. They are authentication, logging, rate limiting, and so on. The best way to add those features is to use an API gateway. In this chapter, we will explore an open-source API gateway called Kong. Open-source software is preferable to cloud providers because of the reduced risk of vendor lock. All the API gateways differ in the implementation but perform the same task.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Why is an API gateway needed?
• Introducing Kong, an open-source API gateway
• Example illustration in Docker
• Adding developed API to Kong
• Logging in Kong
• Authentication and rate limiting in Kong
• Important commands from Kong CLI