Kong Gateway entities

Gateway Services represent the upstream services in your system. These applications are the business logic components of your system responsible for responding to requests.

A Route uses specific URL patterns and HTTP verbs to match incoming requests and pass them to a Gateway Service. This determines which upstream services will process a given request.

A Consumer typically refers to an entity that consumes or uses the APIs managed by Kong Gateway.

Consumer Groups let you apply common configurations to groups of Consumers, such as rate limiting policies or request and response transformation.

An Upstream enables load balancing by providing a virtual hostname and collection of Targets (upstream service instances).

A Target identifies an instance of an upstream service using an IP address or hostname with a port.

Plugins are modules that extend the functionality of Kong Gateway.

Workspaces provide a way to segment Kong Gateway entities. Entities in a Workspace are isolated from those in other Workspaces.

Partials allow you to extract shared configurations into reusable entities that can be linked to multiple plugins

An SNI object represents a many-to-one mapping of hostnames to a certificate.

A Certificate object represents a public certificate, and can be optionally paired with the corresponding private key.

A CA Certificate object represents a trusted certificate authority. These objects are used by Kong Gateway to verify the validity of a client or server certificate.

Vaults allow you to securely store and then reference secrets from within other entities, ensuring that secrets aren’t visible in plaintext throughout the platform.

A Key object holds a representation of asymmetric keys in various formats.

A Key Set is a collection of Kong Gateway Keys.