Until the start of this year, I was in the same boat, well, maybe worst as I had never looked into API Gateways as a hole, only the name came in one of two reads through blogs…
Until I started having to deal with 5 different Microsoervices URL that the same application uses and when trying to swap url’s as I had created a new application to replace an old and buggy one took more than it should 
I think the best way is to have it working on a stage environment… I took the free Heroku route and our stage API’s are now all running through it without any flaws …
I’ve also contributed to Kong Dashboard as they were lacking key-auth authentication and I use it to manage my stage instance …
after a month of testing and be happy with the availability and performance, I’m now installing it on AWS EC2 as from this answer I realized we do not need more than a t2.medium (US$36 / month) to run it on production.
From a starting point the only confusion was the consumers, plugins and uploadstream but with some documentation, help realized that consumer is just an access to an user or an application, there’s a lot of plugins to attach to each to each api, the ones I always attach is acl and key-auth so I can then also add the same acl to a consumer and using it’s key-auth access this or that api …
hope it helps going forward