Typical Kong Workflow

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Hi, I’m brand new to Kong and to api gateways in general. My question concerns the typical workflow of using Kong. Is it fair to say that we’d never instruct external clients to hit port 8000 directly? Rather, we’d tell clients to hit our api at a friendly url (like, e.g., myapi.com/api/products). That’s not the api that serves the content. Rather, that’s an api whose primary function is to route traffic to Kong, passing in the information that Kong needs to hit the actual desired endpoint associated with myapi.com/products. After accessing the actual desired endpoint, kong returns the data back to myapi.com/api/products, which returns the data to the client.

Is my mental model of the typical architectural flow on the right track?

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https://github.com/Kong/kong/blob/master/kong.conf.default , the ports can be changed if you like :slight_smile: . Note any port below 1024 are reserved so you will need to run kong with sudo or root privaledge and make sure nothings using 80(http) or 443(https) and you will not need to specify the port.

Other options involve deploying onto a cloud platform like openshift that establish routes on the common ports fronting your application so you don’t have to worry about changing the default ports(thats what we do). Other options are to front your Application with a Load Balancer that runs on standard ports and routes to Kong on non-standard ports(if you do not have root/sudo access to where you are deploying kong for some reason).

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Thanks, jeremyjpj0916, I appreciate your reply, and that all makes sense.

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Anytime! Glad it helped clarify a few things for yah :slight_smile: .