Verified project record

Kong/kong

Kong is a cloud-native, platform-agnostic gateway designed to orchestrate microservices, conventional API traffic, and agentic LLM and MCP traffic. It provides centralized proxy functionality, AI governance, and extensible deployment models via plugins.

Project overview

Project type: MCP · Model Runtime · Infrastructure
Deployment: Refer to project documentation
License: Apache-2.0

Best for

Developers and operations teams who need to centrally manage and proxy microservices alongside agentic LLM and MCP traffic.
Architects looking for a cloud-native, platform-agnostic gateway that supports declarative and hybrid deployment models without vendor lock-in.

Key capabilities

Centralizes common API, AI, and MCP functionality across services to act as a proxy layer.
Provides MCP traffic governance, security, observability, and autogeneration from any RESTful API.
Provides 60+ AI features like AI observability, semantic security and caching, semantic routing and more.
Supports declarative Databaseless Deployment and Hybrid Deployment (control plane/data plane separation) without any vendor lock-in.

Limitations and risks

Specific databases, external services, model requirements, operating systems, minimum hardware, GPU requirements, and telemetry practices are not documented.

Getting started

The setup difficulty is undocumented; users should prepare to consult additional documentation for specific configuration and first success paths.

Evidence and sources

README: Kong or Kong Gateway is a cloud-native, platform-agnostic, scalable **API 𖧹 LLM 𖧹 MCP** Gateway distinguished for its high performance and extensibility via plugins.
README: Universal LLM API to route across multiple providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, GCP Gemini, AWS Bedrock, Azure AI, Databricks, Mistral, Huggingface and more.
README: :8002` - access Kong's management Web UI ([Kong Manager](https://github.com/Kong/kong-manager)) on [localhost:8002](http://localhost:8002)
README: Developers can build plugins in [Lua](https://docs.konghq.com/gateway/latest/plugin-development/), [Go](https://docs.konghq.com/gateway-oss/latest/external-plugins/#developing-go-…
README: If you prefer to use a cloud-hosted Kong, you can [sign up for a free trial of Kong Konnect](https://konghq.com/products/kong-konnect/register?utm_medium=Referral&utm_source=Githu…

Reviewed at: 2026-07-17T07:31:20Z