Use Cases

Supercharge your Istio clusters with the leading API gateway.

With Kong Gateway and Istio's native integration we can expose Istio services at the edge and to other teams with a full lifecycle APIM solution.

Expose Istio services

By exposing services via Kong’s native Istio integration, we can expose APIs via a full lifecycle APIM solution ready to scale.

Secure, monitor, expand usage

Secure, control and expose Istio services via 100+ Kong plugins, publish them in the service catalog and developer portal, at the edge or internally.

Increase Istio adoption

By supercharging the Istio Gateway with Kong, we cover all the gaps when exposing services, making our teams more comfortable to adopt Istio.

As these integrations scaled up, the addition of a robust API Gateway solution like Kong to our technology stack was a no-brainer.

Sarika Attal , Senior Director at Papa John’s

Being able to inject end-to-end security and tracing without introducing performance issues is huge for our customers. With Kong Mesh and Kong, we know that our customers will get a flexible, high-performance solution for all their needs, now and in the future.

Aaron Weikle , CEO at MS3

With Kong, we knew that we would get something that would work perfectly with our technology today and set us up for where we want to go. Kong allows us to deploy on-premise, easily integrates with all the technologies we use across the company and gives us the flexibility we want to avoid vendor lock-in.

Kanaderu Fukuda , Senior Manager at Yahoo! Japan

Since all regional payment systems were previously monoliths exposing APIs separately, the API gateway was a greenfield project for Verifone. "In moving to microservices, we knew we needed an API gateway."

Hans van Leeuwen , Lead Architect at Verifone

Every Kong plugin now available on Istio

Automatically collect metrics, traces, and logs for every service in the service mesh without any code change in the applications.

10+ AuthN/Z security plugins, including OIDC, OAuth and OPA.
15+ traffic control plugins, like ACL, rate limiting and caching.
10+ observability plugins, like Datadog, Splunk and ELK.
Request and response transformations, format converters.
Native Kafka, GraphQL, gRPC, HTTP and WS support.
Natively Multi-cluster and multi-cloud for every API.

API developer portal, catalogs and analytics

With Kong running as the ingress gateway for Istio, we can create developer portals for our APIs, monitor usage and detect anomalies in our traffic.

Fully customizable Developer Portal.
List Istio services in browsable service catalogs.
Pluggable developer onboarding with OIDC and more.
Visualize API usage across Istio services with Kong Vitals.

Strong integration and partnership

The full lifecycle API management features that Kong brings to every Istio cluster – a Gartner MQ leader – accelerates Istio adoption across the organization.