2025 was a breakout year for Kong Cloud Gateways. As organizations continue to modernize architectures, adopt AI-driven workloads, and operate in increasingly regulated environments, the need for secure, high-performance, and flexible API infrastructure has never been greater.
This year, Kong Cloud Gateways rose to meet that moment, expanding to new clouds, unlocking deeper networking capabilities, strengthening reliability guarantees, and achieving a major security milestone.
From new deployment models to enterprise-grade compliance, here’s a look back at how Kong Cloud Gateways evolved in 2025 — and what it means for teams building the future of APIs and AI.
Kong Cloud Gateways are fully managed, high-performance data planes running on customer-dedicated infrastructure, orchestrated and operated by Kong through Kong Konnect. Customers can choose between:
Together, these models give organizations the flexibility to run Kong where it makes the most sense—without sacrificing control, security, or scale.
This year, we expanded Dedicated Cloud Gateways to Google Cloud Platform (GCP), giving customers more choice in where and how they deploy their API infrastructure.
With the beta launch of Dedicated Cloud Gateways on GCP, customers can now run Kong-managed, single-tenant gateways directly inside GCP environments—bringing the same reliability, scalability, and advanced traffic management capabilities already available on AWS.
Just as importantly, this launch aligned with our SOC 2 compliance posture, reinforcing Kong’s commitment to meeting enterprise security and trust requirements across cloud providers.
Extensibility is at the heart of Kong, and this year we made it significantly easier for enterprise customers to manage custom logic on Dedicated Cloud Gateways.
With Custom Plugin Streaming, customers can now deploy and manage custom plugins without rebuilding or redeploying gateway images. This streamlines operational workflows and gives teams more agility in how they extend gateway behavior.
Custom Plugin Streaming is supported across: Konnect UI, APIs, and declarative tooling, including decK and Terraform
The result? Faster iteration, lower operational overhead, and more control over how custom logic is delivered at scale.
In 2025, Kong Dedicated Cloud Gateways reached a major reliability milestone: a 99.99% SLA.
This reflects not only the resilience of the underlying gateway technology, but also the operational maturity of Kong’s managed cloud platform. For customers running mission-critical APIs, this level of uptime translates directly into confidence—especially in high-traffic, customer-facing, and regulated environments.
Private connectivity continued to be a major focus this year, with several new capabilities designed to help customers securely connect Cloud Gateways to upstream services — without exposing traffic to the public internet.
Dedicated Cloud Gateways now support:
This enables private DNS resolution between Kong-managed gateways and customer VPCs, allowing teams to route traffic to upstream services using internal domain names while maintaining strong network isolation.
We also expanded private connectivity with VPC Peering support on both AWS and GCP.
These options allow customers to choose the networking model that best fits their performance, security, and operational requirements.
To further simplify secure connectivity on AWS, we introduced AWS Resource Endpoints for Dedicated Cloud Gateways.
This allows customers to expose multiple upstream services through a single, customer-controlled VPC endpoint—using one-way connectivity that eliminates bidirectional peering risks. Configuration can be managed directly in Konnect, via API, or with Terraform, making it easier to standardize and automate secure networking at scale.
Visibility is critical when operating APIs at scale. This year, we enhanced real-time dataplane logging for Cloud Gateways, giving customers deeper insight into traffic behavior, request flows, and operational health.
These improvements help teams troubleshoot faster, meet observability requirements, and maintain confidence in production environments.
We closed out the year with a milestone that underscores Kong’s commitment to enterprise security and compliance: Kong Konnect and Kong Cloud Gateways have achieved PCI DSS 4.0 attestation.
This is a significant step forward for customers operating in highly regulated industries—especially financial services, payments, and any organization handling cardholder data. PCI DSS 4.0 introduces more rigorous requirements around security controls, monitoring, and risk management, and this attestation demonstrates that Kong’s managed cloud platform meets those standards.
For teams building payment flows, banking APIs, or compliance-sensitive services, this means Kong Cloud Gateways can be confidently used as part of a PCI-aligned architecture.
In 2025, Kong Cloud Gateways evolved into a more powerful, more flexible, and more trusted platform for API and AI traffic management.
With expanded cloud support, deeper private networking, stronger SLAs, simplified extensibility, and industry-leading compliance, Kong Cloud Gateways are well-positioned to support the next generation of digital platforms.
We’re excited about what’s ahead — and we’re just getting started.
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