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Kong Gateway OSS [ARCHIVE]
2.5.x

Kong Gateway (OSS)

A lightweight open-source API gateway

What is Kong Gateway, technically?

You’ve probably heard that Kong Gateway is built on Nginx, leveraging its stability and efficiency. But how is this possible exactly?

To be more precise, Kong Gateway is a Lua application running in Nginx and made possible by the lua-nginx-module. Instead of compiling Nginx with this module, Kong is distributed along with OpenResty, which already includes lua-nginx-module. OpenResty is not a fork of Nginx, but a bundle of modules extending its capabilities.

This sets the foundations for a pluggable architecture, where Lua scripts (referred to as plugins) can be enabled and executed at runtime. Because of this, we like to think of Kong Gateway as a paragon of microservice architecture: at its core, it implements database abstraction, routing and plugin management. Plugins can live in separate code bases and be injected anywhere into the request lifecycle, all in a few lines of code.

Next Steps

Pick your path:

  • Quickstart: A quick-and-dirty introduction to Kong Gateway, common objects, and basic Admin API commands. Use this if you just want the basics.
  • Getting started guide: An alternative to the quickstart, the complete Kong Gateway getting started guide provides in-depth examples, explanations, and step-by-step instructions, and explores Kong’s many available tools for managing the gateway.