🎂 Make a wish and blow out the candles…we're celebrating Kong's sixth anniversary! 👏👏👏
In 2015, Mashape open sourced [Kong Gateway](https://konghq.com/kong)Kong Gateway, launching the next generation of API management. In our last anniversary post, I took a [look back at our history](https://konghq.com/blog/kong-turns-five)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](https://konghq.com/blog/unitedhealth-group-kong-gateway)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.](https://konghq.com/blog/learning-center/what-is-an-api-gateway)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](https://github.com/nvx)@nvx, [@pariviere](https://github.com/pariviere)@pariviere, [@ishg](https://github.com/ishg)@ishg, [@Asafb26](https://github.com/Asafb26)@Asafb26, [@WALL-E](https://github.com/WALL-E)@WALL-E, [@jeremyjpj0916](https://github.com/jeremyjpj0916)@jeremyjpj0916, [@Abhishekvrshny](https://github.com/Abhishekvrshny)@Abhishekvrshny, [@ealogar](https://github.com/ealogar)@ealogar, [@amberheilman](https://github.com/amberheilman)@amberheilman and [@carnei-ro](https://github.com/carnei-ro)@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](https://konghq.com/blog/unitedhealth-group-kong-gateway)Jeremy Justus, Ross Sbriscia, [Ivan Rylach](https://konghq.com/blog/checkr-kong-gateway)Ivan Rylach, [Mert Simsek](https://konghq.com/blog/kong-gateway-go-plugin)Mert Simsek, [Ashwin Sadeep](https://konghq.com/blog/kong-gateway-spinnaker)Ashwin Sadeep and [Daniel Kocot](https://konghq.com/videos/apiops-automated-processes-for-even-better-apis)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](https://github.com/Kong/kong/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md)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:
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