🎂 Make a wish and blow out the candles…we're celebrating Kong's sixth anniversary! 👏👏👏
In 2015, Mashape open sourced Kong Gateway, launching the next generation of API management. In our last anniversary post, I took a look back at our history. For this 6th anniversary post, I'll focus on how this year went and look forward to what's coming up next.
Kong is the most widely adopted OSS API gateway in the world with over 1.7M instances running across organizations of any size and in every vertical, with more than 257M downloads.
~Jeremy Justus, senior software engineer at UnitedHealth Group/Optum
And while Kong is platform-agnostic and supports 20+ distributions, Kong's Kubernetes Ingress Controller needs a special mention as one of the most popular ways to deploy a modern API gateway ingress.
The Kong Gateway OSS community has grown from 50,000 to 130,000 since our last birthday, continuing to solidify its place as the world's most popular API gateway.
I'd like to give a special thanks to our biggest code contributors. We couldn't do this without your help improving Kong as a product: @nvx, @pariviere, @ishg, @Asafb26, @WALL-E, @jeremyjpj0916, @Abhishekvrshny, @ealogar, @amberheilman and @carnei-ro.
And a special thanks to our top content contributors who have helped us grow the community by demonstrating their amazing Kong Gateway OSS projects: Jeremy Justus, Ross Sbriscia, Ivan Rylach, Mert Simsek, Ashwin Sadeep and Daniel Kocot.
Since our last anniversary, we went from release 2.0 to 2.4. Here are some of the most significant features we've released over the last year:
A full list of changes and related PRs are in the Kong CHANGELOG.
On our sixth anniversary, I've come to the realization that Kong is everywhere. From digital banking applications to food delivery services, people around the world are interacting with our API gateway on a daily basis. Even with so much progress this year, we're just getting started!
In a landscape driven by open source technologies and communities, I am proud of the pioneering work that Kong and our community have accomplished in our OSS journey.
Kong was the first mainstream cloud native API gateway platform to be released after two dark decades of closed source monolithic tools in this space, and it wouldn't be the most adopted API gateway technology today - six years later - without the contributions and the genuine feedback of a strong community that really cared.
Kong's adoption today is stronger than ever, and I am looking forward to all the innovation that we are going to be building together, to turn the old status quo upside down and provide the modern infrastructure of an API-powered world.
Thank you to the Kong Community for your support and contributions! To get the latest updates and project ideas:
Today, we’re announcing that Kong has acquired OpenMeter , the open source and SaaS leader for real-time usage metering and billing. OpenMeter’s capabilities will be integrated into Kong Konnect, enabling usage-based pricing, entitlements, and invo
The healthcare industry is buzzing about FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources). Pronounced “fire,” this widely adopted data standard has been revolutionizing how healthcare information is exchanged. But building a truly modern, secure, a
It’s been almost a year since we released our Konnect Terraform provider . In that time we’ve seen over 300,000 installs, have 1.7 times as many resources available, and have expanded the provider to include data sources to enable federated managem
Kong-quer the Agentic AI Hackathon 🚀 Calling all builders, tinkerers, and API innovators. The Kong Hackathon is back for API Summit 2025 ! This year, we’re challenging developers worldwide to create projects that don’t just react, they think , a
Kong is thrilled to announce the return of Partner Summit live and in person for the first time since 2022! We’re inviting our global Kong partner ecosystem to come together at our premier event that is shaping the future of APIs, AI, and cloud na
This year, at our in-person API Summit , we’re excited to shine a light on the projects and people who aren’t just implementing Kong, but reinventing it. The Kong Innovator Awards recognize outstanding and future-facing projects from Kong custome
In the last two parts of this series, we discussed How to Strengthen a ReAct AI Agent with Kong AI Gateway and How to Build a Single-LLM AI Agent with Kong AI Gateway and LangGraph . In this third and final part, we're going to evolve the AI Agen
