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About 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 with jq to 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:

 
sequenceDiagram
    actor Client
    participant Datakit
    participant Cat facts API
    participant Dog facts API

    Client->>Datakit: Send a request to the 
/animal-fact API endpoint
    Datakit->>Cat facts API: Calls the third-party 
 /cat-facts API endpoint
    Datakit->>Dog facts API: Calls the third-party 
 /dog-facts API endpoint
    Cat facts API->>Datakit: Sends a cat fact
    Dog facts API->>Datakit: Sends a dog fact
    Datakit->>Client: Uses jq to join and pass 
both facts in a response

More information