Customers today face significant challenges as their Kubernetes environments scale. The proliferation of microservices, external integrations, and new AI workloads increases traffic volume and connectivity complexity, creating material risks to performance and availability. The core issue is a lack of end-to-end governance: as diverse workloads expand, unmanaged interactions make it difficult to apply consistent security and enforce global consumption policies.
Kong Konnect unifies and manages APIs, GenAI models, MCP Servers, Agents, Events, and Microservices with a single, centralized Control Plane. Kong Data Plane Gateway acts as an intelligent “control tower” translating external requests into secure and governed internal traffic.
Kong Gateway on VMware vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS) addresses these challenges by providing a unified, policy-driven platform for comprehensive connectivity. This architecture establishes Kong as the standardized management and traffic governance layer for VKS, helping organizations bridge the gap between traditional infrastructure and AI-native agility. It ensures that every request, from the physical host to the deepest AI workload, is secure, optimized, and controlled. This benefits customers by providing a centralized experience that reduces operational complexity and ensures consistent security across all runtimes.
Built on top of Kong API Gateway, the [Kong AI Gateway](https://konghq.com/products/kong-ai-gateway)Kong AI Gateway is designed to address key challenges in enterprise AI adoption.
Modern AI applications rarely rely on a single model; instead, they orchestrate multiple GenAI providers, agent frameworks, Agent-to-Agent (A2A) interactions, external [MCP (Model Context Protocol)](https://konghq.com/blog/learning-center/what-is-mcp)MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers, and traditional REST-based APIs. Kong AI Gateway can be implemented as:
All these capabilities position Kong AI Gateway as a unified control plane for APIs, AI models, tools, and agent ecosystems — enabling organizations to move from isolated AI integrations to fully orchestrated, secure, and scalable intelligent systems.
VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) with VKS delivers an enterprise-grade Kubernetes runtime natively integrated into the VCF platform. As a CNCF-certified distribution, VKS enables platform teams to deploy and operate Kubernetes clusters while leveraging the full set of infrastructure and cloud services available in VCF.
Cloud administrators benefit from support for N-2 Kubernetes versions, strong security controls, and streamlined lifecycle management—making it easier to adopt and operate modern, containerized applications at scale.
Key benefits:
The diagram above describes the three main flows we typically have on an Agentic Application:
One of the key benefits is centralized policy enforcement. With Kong, organizations can define authentication, rate limiting, transformation, and security policies once and apply them globally. This ensures that all services, Agents, MCP Servers, and GenAI Models, adhere to the same standards. For example, an enterprise can enforce API key validation, OAuth2 authentication, or JWT verification across all endpoints without requiring individual service teams to implement these controls themselves.
Observability and analytics also play a crucial role. Kong Konnect provides deep insights into traffic patterns, service performance, and usage metrics. For instance, teams can monitor API and AI usage trends, track error rates, and analyze latency distributions across services, all from a centralized dashboard.
VKS implements the Platform layer, which hosts the data plane nodes (Kong Agent Gateway + MCP/LLM Gateway). It also provides an enterprise-grade Kubernetes runtime with networking (Antrea), storage (CSI), and certificate management.
This architecture establishes Kong as the standardized management and traffic governance layer for VKS, helping organizations bridge the gap between traditional infrastructure and AI-native agility. By unifying control across all types of workloads, Kong ensures that organizations can scale confidently without losing visibility or control.
To learn more about how VKS and Kong work together, refer to the full [_Reference Architecture_](https://www.vmware.com/docs/isv-kong-vks?_gl=1*h8gxl5*_ga*NDcxMzI0NTE3LjE3NzczMTQwOTU.*_ga_8VJHMNGE3E*czE3Nzc0NzY1MDUkbzQkZzAkdDE3Nzc0NzY1MDUkajYwJGwwJGgw)_Reference Architecture_.
Together, Kong Gateway and VKS transform the API gateway into a strategic control plane for Agentic Applications, enabling businesses to innovate faster while maintaining the highest standards of performance and security. Instead of managing multiple disjointed tools, organizations can standardize on a single layer that handles traffic management, security, and observability across all workloads. This simplifies operations while improving consistency and control.
Explore the documentation from VMware and Kong to find the right deployment path for your environment.
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[](https://konghq.com/blog/enterprise/ai-agent-integration-gartner-ai-control-layer)
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[](https://konghq.com/blog/engineering/ai-infrastructure-with-kong-and-akamai)
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Traditional APIs are, in a word, predictable. You know what you're getting: Compute costs that don't surprise you Traffic patterns that behave themselves Clean, well-defined request and response cycles AI APIs, especially anything that runs on LLMs
[](https://konghq.com/blog/engineering/monetize-ai-apis)