4 key capabilities of Kong’s Event Gateway for real-time event streams

Event-driven architecture (EDA) has long been a foundational piece of scalable, real-time systems. This includes things like payment processing and fraud detection, IoT and logistics, and AI-powered applications. Today, with AI, the value of streaming data is more apparent than ever. Despite this, the operational complexity of managing platforms like Apache Kafka has often slowed adoption or limited its reach.

Kong’s new Event Gateway is designed to simplify and secure the adoption of event-driven architecture by giving platform teams and developers the ability to expose Kafka as Kong-managed APIs and services in the same place where you’d use Kong to manage API, AI, and service mesh deployments. This allows you to bring all of the benefits of your Konnect API Platform to the event streaming universe, using the Event Gateway and Konnect platform to enforce policies for security, governance, and cost controls across your entire API, AI, and event streaming estate.

Here are four ways the Event Gateway helps organizations unlock the full potential of their Kafka investments.

Manage Kafka event streams in the same way you manage your APIs

Event Gateway enables platform teams to expose Kafka topics as HTTP APIs (such as REST or server-sent events APIs) or as services that communicate over the native Kafka protocol. Whichever route you choose, you can use Kong plugins and policies to bring the same level of security, reliability, and governance to your Kafka estate as you would with your Kong-managed API and AI estates. 

Reduce Kafka infrastructure costs with virtual clusters and topics

Kafka is great for transmission of business critical data at massive scale without sacrificing performance—essential for any real-time initiatives. However, Kafka can present challenges pertaining to client isolation and access control to data at the event level. Today, Kafka often requires infrastructure and platform teams to often implement (and pay for) duplicate topics, partitions, and data to effectively segment subsets of data.

Kong can reduce overall infrastructure costs related to Kafka through virtual clusters and topics. Kong’s virtual clusters and concentrated topics functionality will allow for scalable and efficient logical isolation—all managed by Kong—which cost much less to run, ultimately allowing you to drive greater and greater Kafka cost efficiencies as you expand the footprint of your eventing platform.

Strengthen your cloud security posture

Moving to cloud and vendor-managed versions of Kafka enables EDA teams to focus on building event-driven architectures without the operational burden of managing Kafka infrastructure. However, while the value of the cloud is clear, many organizations still have concerns about PII (personally identifiable data) and other sensitive data running through vendor cloud environments.

The Kong Event Gateway can help with this by enforcing encryption at the gateway layer, within your private network, so that data in your cloud environment is encrypted.

Turn event streams into real-time data products

With Event Gateway, organizations can expose Kafka event streams as structured, reusable API data products.

The protocol mediation approach opens up the value of real-time data in Kafka to developers and customers that don’t want to, or can’t, set up their applications as Kafka clients. Kong Event Gateway customers will be able to expose access to this real-time data as REST APIs and server-sent events APIs to ensure that they can meet developers, partners, and customers where they are.

Event Gateway will be available as part of Kong Konnect, the unified API platform built to help organizations power API-driven innovation at scale with performance, security, and governance across all service types. With Event Gateway, Kong supports the entire API life cycle with one end-to-end platform, enabling teams to discover, observe, and govern event APIs alongside large language model (LLM) APIs, REST APIs, and any other supported service type in the Kong platform.

As organizations shift toward real-time, API-first architectures, Kong helps them manage that transformation securely and efficiently. By bringing event streams into your API Platform, Event Gateway allows teams to move faster, reduce operational burden and build more responsive, data-driven applications.

For a full list of features and documentation, visit the Kong Event Gateway product page.

Marco Palladino is the CTO and co-founder of Kong.

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