This tutorial will walk through a common use case for the Kong Gateway Key Authentication plugin: using API key authentication to protect a route to an API server endpoint. It’s a simple use case, but it will give you the foundation to deploy and configure the plugin for your own unique project needs. Before we walk through our mini-project, let’s cover a few core concepts.
One of the most powerful capabilities provided by Kong Konnect Enterprise is the support for Hybrid deployments. In other words, it implements distributed API Gateway Clusters with multiple instances running on several environments at the same time. Moreover, Kong Enterprise provides a new topology option, named Hybrid Mode, with a total separation of the Control Plane (CP) and Data Plane (DP).
We looked at service design considerations in the first part of this blog series. In this next part, I’d like to share some best practices for API versioning – a topic that comes up quite often with every customer as it is one of the key concerns when implementing API gateways. There are two ways to version RESTful APIs: URI and header-based, as summarized in this REST API tutorial.