Kong
Kong is an open-source API gateway and microservices management platform that handles API requests, routing, authentication, and monitoring. It acts as a centralized entry point for client applications to access backend services, providing features like load balancing, rate limiting, and security controls. Originally built on NGINX, Kong is widely used in modern cloud-native and microservices architectures to simplify API management.
Developers should learn Kong when building or managing microservices-based applications that require scalable API management, security, and observability. It is particularly useful in distributed systems where multiple services need unified access control, traffic routing, and performance monitoring, such as in e-commerce platforms or SaaS products. Kong helps reduce complexity by offloading cross-cutting concerns from individual services to a dedicated gateway layer.