PermalinkWelcome to Kong
PermalinkIntroduction
This guide is going to take you through a quick introduction on how to use Kong and perform basic operations such as:
PermalinkWhat is Kong, technically?
You’ve probably heard that Kong is built on Nginx, leveraging its stability and efficiency. But how is this possible exactly?
To be more precise, Kong is a Lua application running in Nginx and made possible by the lua-nginx-module. Instead of compiling Nginx with this module, Kong is distributed along with OpenResty, which already includes lua-nginx-module. OpenResty is not a fork of Nginx, but a bundle of modules extending its capabilities.
This sets the foundations for a pluggable architecture, where Lua scripts (referred to as ”plugins”) can be enabled and executed at runtime. Because of this, we like to think of Kong as a paragon of microservice architecture: at its core, it implements database abstraction, routing and plugin management. Plugins can live in separate code bases and be injected anywhere into the request lifecycle, all in a few lines of code.
PermalinkNext Steps
Now, lets get familiar with learning how to “start” and “stop” Kong.