In this section, we will discuss about the KONG, let's see the following quote about the KONG:
– Owen Garrett, head of products at NGINX
Kong is an open source and scalable API layer, running in front of RESTful APIs that have been extended through plugins. This way, Kong provides extra functionality and services that are way beyond the services provided by the core platform.
The original purpose of building KONG at Mashape was to secure, manage, and extend the APIs and microservices that are above 15,000, for the purposes of marketplace related to APIs. This method generates huge numbers, going into the billions, of requests over a month for more than 2,00,000 developers. Now KONG APIs are used for the deployment of critical missions in various organizations of different scales, small or large.
As we have said, KONG is an API gateway, which is a filter that sits in front of your RESTful API. This gateway will provide the following functionality:
- Access control: Only allows authenticated and authorized traffic
- Rate limiting: Restricts how much traffic is sent to your API
- Analytics, metrics, and logging: Tracks how your API is used
- Security filtering: Makes sure the incoming traffic is not an attack
- Redirection: Sends traffic to a different endpoint.
Any client makes a call to your REST API by going through KONG. It will send proxy client requests to the REST API. It executes all common functionalities that you have set up for your REST API, such as the rate limit plugin installed. KONG will check and make sure the request doesn't exceed the specified limits before calling your API. Let's see the following diagram:
As you can see, the client will call the API through the KONG server. KONG orchestrates common functionality, such as rate limiting, access control, and logging.