Kong is an open-source API gateway and platform for managing, securing, and observing traffic between clients and backend services. It sits in front of APIs and provides capabilities such as routing, authentication, rate limiting, transformations, logging, load balancing, and plugin-based policy enforcement. Kong is widely used in microservice architectures and can be deployed in self-hosted or managed environments.

As AI applications increasingly depend on multiple model and agent endpoints, API gateways such as Kong can also become part of AI infrastructure for controlling access, monitoring usage, and standardizing traffic across services. The project supports extensibility through plugins and integrates with Kubernetes and cloud-native stacks. Kong is best suited to engineering and platform teams that need a reliable control layer for APIs rather than an end-user application.