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Report an issueAbout Datakit
This feature is released as a tech preview (alpha-quality) and should not be depended upon in a production environment.
The Kong Gateway Datakit is a plugin that allows you to interact with third-party APIs. It sends requests to third-party APIs, then uses the response data to seed information for subsequent calls, either upstream or to other APIs.
Datakit is a data flow engine built on top of the WASM engine within the Kong Gateway. It allows you to create an API workflow, which can include:
- Making calls to third party APIs
- Transforming or combining API responses
- Modifying client requests and service responses
- Adjusting Kong entity configuration
- Returning directly to users instead of proxying
Use cases for Datakit
The following are examples of common use cases for Datakit:
| Use case | Description |
|---|---|
| Internal authentication | Use internal auth within your ecosystem by sending response headers to upstreams. |
| Service callout | Reach out to a third-party service, then combine with other requests or augment the original request before sending back to the upstream. |
| Dynamic service discovery | Integrate seamlessly with third-party APIs that assist with service discovery and set new upstream values dynamically. |
| Get and set Kong entity properties | Use Datakit to adjust Kong Gateway entity configurations. For example, you could replace the service URL or set a header on a route. |
See the Datakit examples reference for example configurations for these use cases.
How does it work?
The core component of Datakit is a node. Nodes are inputs to other nodes, which creates the execution path for a given Datakit configuration.
Datakit provides the following node types:
-
call: Third-party HTTP calls -
jq: Transform data and cast variables withjqto be shared with other nodes -
handlebars: Apply a Handlebars template to a raw string, useful for producing arbitrary non-JSON content types -
exit: Return directly to the client -
property: Get and set Kong Gateway configuration data
Datakit can be applied to services and routes. Like any plugin, you can configure Datakit via the /plugins endpoint.
The following diagram shows how Datakit can be used to combine two third-party API calls into one response:
