Used For

• +**Your servers crash every time you hit Reddit frontpage** → Kong spreads traffic across multiple servers automatically, keeps your app running when viral
• +**Each service needs separate login systems and it's security chaos** → Central authentication with OAuth and JWT tokens, one place to control access
• +**You're manually checking if backend services are alive** → Health checks ping your servers every 5 seconds, routes traffic away from dead ones instantly
• +**Debugging API issues takes hours across different services** → Real-time dashboard shows exactly which connections are slow or breaking
• +Transforms data formats on the fly - converts JSON to XML without touching your backend code

Best For

• >Your app keeps crashing when traffic spikes and you're tired of 3am server fires
• >You've got 10+ services that each need their own security setup and it's becoming a nightmare
• >Your team is spending more time configuring routing than building features

Not For

• -Solo developers or startups under 10 people — this is overkill for simple apps and needs serious DevOps knowledge
• -Teams wanting plug-and-play simplicity — you'll spend 4-8 hours on initial setup and need to learn Kubernetes
• -Companies handling under 50,000 requests per day — regular NGINX will do the job without the complexity

Pairs With

• *Kubernetes (where Kong actually runs and manages your containerized services)
• *Prometheus (to store all those API metrics Kong generates so you can actually see what's happening)
• *Grafana (for pretty dashboards because Kong's built-in monitoring looks like server logs)
• *Docker (how you'll actually deploy Kong unless you want to compile from source like a masochist)
• *OAuth providers (like Auth0 or Okta for the actual user authentication Kong enforces)
• *NGINX (Kong runs on top of this - it's the engine under the hood)
• *AWS Load Balancer (works together for enterprise setups that need multiple layers of traffic management)

The Catch

• !The open-source version is free but you'll hit paid support needs fast once you're running serious traffic (clusters get complex)
• !Admin API controls everything - one misconfiguration exposes your entire system to attackers
• !Over 100 plugins sounds great until you spend hours finding the right ones and need Lua coding skills for custom logic

Bottom Line

The bouncer your microservices didn't know they needed - handles millions of requests while you sleep.