Kong API Gateway Essentials

"Kong API Gateway Essentials"
"Kong API Gateway Essentials" is an authoritative guide designed for architects, DevOps engineers, and technical leads seeking to master Kong, the industry's leading API gateway platform. The book begins with a thorough examination of Kong's foundational architecture and its indispensable role in modern distributed systems, exploring control and data plane separation, deployment topologies for high availability, and the evolution of the Kong ecosystem. Readers are introduced to configuration modes, datastore options, and the nuances behind DB-backed versus DB-less operation, equipping them to make informed architectural decisions for enterprise-scale deployments.
The practical core of this guide delves into every aspect of managing Kong lifecycles, from initial installation on diverse infrastructures to adopting automation tools for orchestration, zero-downtime upgrades, and advanced health monitoring strategies. Comprehensive chapters cover service and route management, dynamic configuration via the Admin API, and GitOps workflows using decK, ensuring robust resource organization and progressive delivery techniques. A dedicated section on Kong's powerful plugin framework equips readers to implement, govern, and extend gateway functionality-covering built-in security and traffic control plugins, developing custom Lua extensions, and enforcing organizational policy at scale.
Security, performance, and reliability are prioritized throughout, with best practices for RBAC, TLS/mTLS, identity federation, threat mitigation, load balancing, disaster recovery, observability, and automated incident response thoroughly detailed. The book culminates in architectural blueprints and real-world case studies, demonstrating how organizations can enable multi-tenancy, API monetization, legacy system modernization, hybrid/cloud deployments, and seamless service mesh integration. "Kong API Gateway Essentials" is an indispensable resource for harnessing the full power of Kong to drive secure, scalable, and resilient API infrastructure.