Common terms used across Kong.
|
Term |
Description |
Link |
|---|---|---|
| Admin | An admin is a Kong Gateway user account capable of accessing the Admin API or Kong Manager. | Admin entity |
| Beta | A functionality of a feature or release version is of high quality and can be used in a non-production environment. | Stages of software availability |
| Consumer | A Consumer object represents the client of a Service. | Consumer entity |
| Credential | A unique string associated with a Consumer, for example, an API key. | Consumer entity |
| Dev Portal | A web application that functions as a collection of API products, specs, and documentation objects. The purpose of a Dev Portal is to allow registration and consumption of services running through Kong to other teams, developers, and partners. | Dev Portal |
| Event Gateway policy | In Event Gateway, policies can be used to intercept client connections and transform messages between the client and the broker. | Event Gateway policies |
| Gateway Service | Gateway Services represent the upstream services in your system. These applications are the business logic components of your system responsible for responding to requests. | Gateway Service entity |
| Groups | Sets of role-defined entities. | Group entity |
| Insomnia plugin | Insomnia plugins can be used to extend the functionality of Insomnia with advanced features and customizable themes. | Insomnia plugins |
| Kong Gateway plugin | Kong Gateway plugins provide advanced functionality and extend the use of Kong Gateway, allowing you to add new features to your gateway. Plugins can be configured to run in a variety of contexts, ranging from a specific Route to all upstreams. Plugins can perform operations in your environment, such as authentication, rate limiting, or transformations on a proxied request. |
Plugin entity Plugin Hub |
| Kong plugin or bundled plugin | A plugin developed, maintained, and supported by Kong. Unless otherwise noted in the plugin’s description on the Kong Plugin Hub, all Kong-supported plugins are bundled with their relevant Kong Gateway install packages, and are available in Konnect. | Kong Plugin Hub |
| Mesh policy | Mesh policies bundle features for your service traffic and network configuration. | Mesh policies |
| Permissions | A permission is a policy representing the ability to create, read, update, or delete an Admin API entity defined by endpoints. Permissions are a self-managed Kong Gateway Enterprise concept. | RBAC entity |
| Premium partner plugin | A third-party custom plugin that has been validated by Kong and meets certain standards. Although these plugins are developed, tested, and maintained by an external developer, the plugin owner also ensures the plugin’s version compatibility with Kong Gateway. | Premium partners |
| Role | A role is a set of permissions that may be reused and assigned to admins and users. |
Roles in self-managed Kong Gateway Roles in Konnect |
| Route | A Route defines rules to match client requests to upstream services. Each Route is associated with a Gateway Service, and a Service may have multiple Routes associated with it. | Route entity |
| Service Catalog service | A Service Catalog service in Konnect represents a service running within your organization. Each Service Catalog service aggregates both internal tools, like Gateway and Mesh Services, and external integrations, like GitHub repositories and Slack webhooks. | Service Catalog |
| Super admin | A super admin is a specialized role in self-managed Kong Gateway that manages Workspaces, admins, roles, and customizes permissions. | Create a super admin |
| Teams | Teams organize developers into working groups. |
Teams in self-managed Kong Gateway Teams in Konnect |
| Tech preview | An early-stage, experimental feature that should not be used in a production environment. Some products or projects may also call this stage alpha. | Stages of software availability |
| Third-party or community plugin | A custom plugin developed, maintained, and supported by an external developer, not by Kong. Unless explicitly labeled as a premium partner, Kong does not test these plugins or maintain their version compatibility. If you need any support with these plugins, contact the maintainer directly. | Third-party plugins |
| Upstream | An Upstream enables load balancing by providing a virtual hostname and collection of Targets, or upstream service instances, to which client requests are forwarded. | Upstream entity |
| Upstream service | An instance of your own application, usually running behind Kong Gateway, Mesh, etc. Also referred to as an upstream application, service application, or backend service. | N/A |
| Workspace |
Workspaces enable an organization to segment objects and admins into namespaces. The segmentation allows teams of admins sharing the same Kong Gateway cluster to adopt roles for interacting with specific objects. Workspaces are available in self-managed Kong Gateway Enterprise only. When running Kong Gateway in Konnect, entity and user segmentation is handled through Control Planes and Control Plane Groups. |
Workspace entity |