← Gateway Entities

Services

Uses: Kong Gateway decK KIC Terraform

What is a service?

In Kong Gateway, a service is an abstraction of an upstream application that services requests. Services can store collections of objects like plugin configurations, and policies, and they can be associated with routes.

When defining a service, the administrator provides a name and the upstream application connection information. The connection details can be provided in the url field as a single string, or by providing individual values for protocol, host, port, and path individually.

Services have a one-to-many relationship with upstream applications, which allows administrators to create sophisticated traffic management behaviors.

Services, in conjunction with routes, let you expose your services to clients with Kong Gateway. Kong Gateway abstracts the service from the clients by using routes. Since the client always calls the route, changes to the services (like versioning) don’t impact how clients make the call. Routes also allow the same service to be used by multiple clients and apply different policies based on the route used.

 
flowchart LR
  A(API client)
  B("`Route 
  (/mock)`")
  C("`Service
  (example-service)`")
  D(Upstream 
  application)
  
  A <--requests
  responses--> B
  subgraph id1 ["`
  **KONG GATEWAY**`"]
    B <--requests
    responses--> C
  end
  C <--requests
  responses--> D

  style id1 rx:10,ry:10

Schema

Set up a Service

The following creates a new service called example-service with basic configuration:

_format_version: '3.0'
services:
  - name: example-service
    url: http://httpbin.org

To create a service, call the Admin API’s /services endpoint.

curl -X POST http://localhost:8001/services/ \
    --header "accept: application/json" \
    --header "Content-Type: application/json" \
    --data '
    {
      "name": "example-service",
      "url": "http://httpbin.org"
    }
    '

To create a service, call the Konnect control plane config API’s /services endpoint.

curl -X POST https://{region}.api.konghq.com/v2/control-planes/{controlPlaneId}/core-entities/services/ \
    --header "accept: application/json" \
    --header "Content-Type: application/json" \
    --header "Authorization: Bearer $KONNECT_TOKEN" \
    --data '
    {
      "name": "example-service",
      "url": "http://httpbin.org"
    }
    '

Make sure to replace the following placeholders with your own values:

region: Geographic region where your Kong Konnect is hosted and operates.
controlPlaneId: The id of the control plane.
KONNECT_TOKEN: Your Personal Access Token (PAT) associated with your Konnect account.

See the Konnect API reference to learn about region-specific URLs and personal access tokens.

Kong Ingress Controller does not manage services directly. Any Kubernetes resources referenced by an Ingress or Gateway API *Route resource will automatically be created.

Create a Route to get started.

Prerequisite: Configure your Personal Access Token

terraform {
  required_providers {
    konnect = {
      source  = "kong/konnect"
    }
  }
}

provider "konnect" {
  personal_access_token = "$KONNECT_TOKEN"
  server_url            = "https://us.api.konghq.com/"
}

resource "konnect_gateway_service" "my_service" {
  url = "http://httpbin.org"

  control_plane_id = konnect_gateway_control_plane.my_konnect_cp.id
}

The following creates a new service called example-service with basic configuration:

In Kong Manager or Gateway Manager, go to Gateway Services.
Click New Gateway Service.
Enter a unique name for the service. In this example, it’s example-service.
Define the endpoint for this service by specifying the full URL or by its separate elements. In this example, the full upstream URL is http://httpbin.org.
Click Save.

Services

What is a service?

Schema

Set up a Service

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