Buidling Resilient API Gateway Patterns at Scale

Athenahealth’s Kong Gateway patterns for scale: Redis-backed rate limiting, global quota sync, proactive cache prefetch, automated Route 53 failover, and deep observability.

Athenahealth shares how they run Kong Gateway at scale with resilient patterns that reduce latency, protect backends, and improve reliability across regions.

What you’ll learn:
- Scalable Redis-backed rate limiting with NGINX timers (sub-ms latency)
- Global quota synchronization across regions using Redis hashtag keys
- Proactive cache prefetch to eliminate cold-cache latency on low-volume traffic
- Resilient client config management using event queues and retries
- Automated Route 53 failover and health checks for multi-region traffic
- Log enrichment and normalized paths + Prometheus/Grafana metrics