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Kong Gateway Consulting & Support

Kong Consulting & Services for Enterprises

AceMQ engineers deploy and operate Kong Gateway in front of production APIs — DB-backed and DB-less, on VMs and on Kubernetes. We design plugin chains that hold under load and migrate teams off gateways that have become too expensive to keep.

Without moving your APIs onto a different gateway

11+ Senior SMEs<15min Emergency SLA130+ Customers26+ Countries Served

AceMQ is trusted by global brands Including

The Problem

Why teams call us about Kong

Plugin ordering was never made explicit and the same request behaves differently across routes
Rate-limit counters are held per node, so the effective limit is multiplied by the node count
The database-backed control plane is a single point of failure and DB-less was never evaluated
Upstream health checks mark healthy targets down under load and traffic oscillates between them
Custom Lua plugins were written by one engineer and nobody else will touch them
Consumer and credential objects have accumulated and no one knows which are still in use
The ingress controller configuration and the admin API configuration have quietly drifted apart
Enterprise plugin entitlement costs more than the handful of features actually in use
Our Services

Kong Consulting & Support

Every engagement is staffed by a senior Kong engineer — no juniors, no ticket queues.

01

Kong Gateway Architecture & Implementation

The DB-backed versus DB-less decision shapes your deployment model, your config workflow, and your failure behavior. We make that call deliberately and build the control plane topology around it.

  • DB-backed versus DB-less declarative configuration, with the operational tradeoffs stated up front
  • Control plane and data plane split for hybrid mode, including certificate rotation and node bootstrap
  • Route, service, and consumer modeling that survives team growth without a flat namespace collapse
  • decK-driven GitOps workflow so gateway configuration is reviewed and versioned like application code
02

Plugin Strategy & Performance Tuning

Every plugin runs in the request path. Ordering, shared state, and rate limiter backend choice decide whether the gateway adds a millisecond or becomes the bottleneck itself.

  • Authentication design across OIDC, JWT, key-auth, and mTLS with consumer and credential modeling
  • Rate limiting strategy: local versus cluster versus Redis counters, and the accuracy-latency tradeoff of each
  • Plugin execution order and scoping so global plugins do not silently run on every internal route
  • Upstream health checks, retry, and timeout tuning plus worker process and connection pool sizing
03

API Gateway Migration to Kong

Gateway migrations fail on policy parity and consumer credentials, not on routing. We map both before moving a single route and run the old and new gateways side by side.

  • Apigee, MuleSoft, WSO2, or legacy gateway migration with policy-by-policy mapping to Kong plugins
  • Consumer, credential, and API key migration without forcing every client to re-onboard at once
  • Custom policy translation into Kong plugins, including Lua or Go plugin development where no equivalent exists
  • Weighted traffic shifting per route with a rollback path that does not require a redeploy
04

Managed Kong Operations

Ongoing operational coverage for gateways carrying production API traffic — including Kong Ingress Controller on Kubernetes, where gateway config and cluster state have to stay in agreement.

  • Kong Ingress Controller deployment and Gateway API resource management on Kubernetes
  • 24/7 monitoring of upstream health, latency percentiles, 5xx rates, and data plane node status
  • Version upgrade planning across Kong Gateway releases with plugin compatibility verification
  • Named engineer on your account with a 15-minute emergency response SLA
05

Kong Health Check & Assessment

A structured review of routing, plugins, and security posture — including an honest read on whether Kong Gateway Enterprise features are earning their license cost for you.

  • Route and service configuration audit for shadowed routes, overly broad paths, and orphaned entities
  • Plugin inventory and execution order review with latency attribution per plugin
  • Security review: authentication coverage per route, admin API exposure, TLS and certificate handling
  • Kong OSS versus Enterprise assessment based on which paid features you actually use, plus a written remediation report

24/7 Kong Support

15 MIN SLA

Named senior engineers on your account — 15-minute emergency response, no ticket routing, no junior triage.

  • 15-minute emergency response SLA
  • Named engineer, zero cold-start
  • Proactive CVE & health monitoring
  • Quarterly deployment reviews
View support plans
How It Works

What actually happens next

11–2 weeks

Gateway assessment

We review service and route layout, plugin chains and their ordering, rate-limiting strategy, upstream health checks, the DB-backed or DB-less deployment model and any custom Lua in the path.

2Within a week

Written findings and plan

Prioritised findings with the reasoning attached, including which enterprise plugins are genuinely load-bearing and which are replaceable.

3Scoped per engagement

Implementation alongside your team

We restructure plugin chains, rate-limiting and upstream configuration with your engineers rather than around them, route by route with rollback at each step.

4Ongoing

Handover and optional cover

Runbooks for node replacement, plugin changes and upstream failure behaviour, plus 24/7 support with a 15-minute emergency SLA if you want it.

A senior engineer, not an SDR. No sales sequence attached.
Customer Success

Real Kong Results

See how enterprises trust AceMQ for their most critical Kong workloads.

All use cases
☁️Remediation

Kong 502 and Upstream Health Check Remediation

Digital Commerce Platform

Tracing intermittent 502s at the Kong gateway to misconfigured active health checks and stale DNS resolution of upstream service names.

KongKubernetesNGINX+2
Read case study
☁️Support

Kong Rate Limiting Consistency Support

B2B SaaS Provider

Fixing rate limits that allowed several times the configured quota because the plugin was using the local counter policy across a multi-node gateway.

KongRedisKubernetes+1
Read case study
🌐Consulting

Kong Gateway Architecture and Migration Consulting

Multi-Line Insurance Carrier

Designing a Kong topology for a company consolidating several ad-hoc API entry points, including control plane separation and environment promotion.

KongKubernetesPostgreSQL+2
Read case study
💳Assessment

Kong Plugin and Latency Assessment

Payments Technology Provider

Measuring where request latency is actually spent inside the Kong plugin chain, and which plugins are worth their cost.

KongRedisKubernetes+1
Read case study
📡Support

Apigee Proxy Latency and Policy Chain Support

Telecommunications Provider

Debugging proxy-level latency and policy execution problems in Apigee that sit outside what the platform vendor's support will investigate.

ApigeeKubernetesDocker+1
Read case study
🌐Remediation

Apigee Quota and Spike Arrest Behavior Remediation

Travel Booking Platform

Correcting Apigee quota and spike arrest configuration that was rejecting legitimate traffic while letting genuine bursts through to backends.

ApigeeRedisKubernetes+1
Read case study
🌐Consulting

Apigee Edge to Apigee X Migration Consulting

Global Logistics Operator

Planning and executing a migration from Apigee Edge to Apigee X, including the policy, networking, and analytics differences that break naive lift-and-shift.

ApigeeKubernetesDocker+1
Read case study
💳Assessment

Apigee Proxy Estate and Shared Flow Redesign Assessment

Consumer Financial Services Company

Assessing a sprawling Apigee proxy estate and designing a shared flow architecture that removes duplicated policy logic across hundreds of proxies.

ApigeeKongKubernetes+1
Read case study
24/7 Support

Kong Support When It Matters Most

Direct access to senior engineers — 15-minute emergency response, no ticket routing, no junior triage.

15 min

Emergency

1 hour

Critical

4 hours

High

Next Day

Standard

How Our Support Actually Works

Beyond SLAs — the model behind senior-only, zero-cold-start expert access.

Named Engineers on Your Account

Every ticket is handled by a senior SME assigned to your account — not a pool of anonymous agents. Zero cold-start. No re-explaining your environment.

Live Escalation on Any Ticket

Any ticket can be escalated to a live session with your named engineer via calendar booking. No gatekeeping, no approval required — direct access, always.

Proactive Risk Mitigation

Quarterly health checks on your deployment plus shared intelligence from 50+ support customers — we surface risks before they reach production.

Critical Bug & CVE Intelligence

Proactive alerts on critical bugs and CVEs affecting your exact version, with version compliance monitoring so you're never caught off guard.

Licensing & Security Edge

Dedicated support for vendor license negotiations and compliance audits, plus bi-annual security reviews focused on your specific deployment.

Direct Product Roadmap Access

As the only vendor directly connected to the core engineering teams, AceMQ delivers exclusive early insights, strategic upgrade planning, and curated release summaries — tailored to your environment.

49+ Platforms Supported

We Support Your Entire Tech Stack

Kong rarely fails in isolation. AceMQ covers the full surrounding infrastructure — so one team owns the whole path instead of pointing at each other.

Message Brokers & Event Streaming

RabbitMQApache KafkaActiveMQIBM MQAmazon SQSAzure Service BusGoogle Pub/SubRedpandaApache Pulsar

Databases & Caching

RedisMongoDBPostgreSQLMySQLApache CassandraMemcached

Search & Analytics

ElasticsearchOpenSearchELK StackClickHouseApache Druid

Lakehouse & Compute

DatabricksSnowflakeStarburstApache SparkApache HadoopApache Flink

Observability & Monitoring

PrometheusGrafanaDatadogNew RelicSplunk

Data Integration & Orchestration

Apache AirflowApache NiFiAirbytePentaho

Cloud & Containers

KubernetesDockerAWS LambdaAzure Functions

API Management & Integration

KongApigeeMuleSoftWSO2

VMware Tanzu

Tanzu RabbitMQGreenPlumGemFireSpringValkeyPostgres
View Support Plans
Why AceMQ

The engineer model
that actually holds.

No junior triage, no ticket queues, no offshore routing — direct access to the named engineer who knows your environment.

11+

Senior SMEs

<15min

Emergency SLA

130+

Customers

26+

Countries Served

Gateways Under Production Traffic

Our engineers operate Kong in front of live payment, telecom, and SaaS APIs, on Kubernetes and on VMs, across DB-backed and DB-less deployments.

Break/Fix Through Root Cause

We stay engaged until the latency spike, upstream flap, or plugin conflict is understood and fixed — not just until the error rate drops.

Healthcheck & Quarterly Reviews

Structured route, plugin, security posture, and licensing reviews with a prioritized remediation report after each one.

15-Min Emergency Response

Named engineer on your account. When the gateway starts returning 5xx in production, you call us directly — no ticket, no triage, no cold-start.

FAQs

Kong Questions Answered

Common questions about Kong consulting, support, and migrations.

Gateway architecture including DB-backed versus DB-less and hybrid control plane design, plugin and authentication strategy, rate limiting design, Kong Ingress Controller deployment on Kubernetes, performance tuning, and migration from other API gateways. Every engagement is staffed by a named senior engineer.

DB-less with declarative configuration suits teams that already deploy through CI and want configuration reviewed like code — no database to run, and data planes come up with known state. DB-backed suits environments needing runtime configuration changes through the Admin API, dynamic consumer registration, or plugins that require the datastore. For most Kubernetes deployments we recommend declarative configuration managed with decK or the Ingress Controller.

Policy parity first. We inventory every policy on every proxy — quota, spike arrest, OAuth, transformations — and map each to a Kong plugin or a custom plugin where no equivalent exists. Consumer credentials are migrated so clients are not forced to re-onboard. Then we shift traffic per route with weighted routing and keep the old gateway available until each route has proven itself.

It depends on which Enterprise features you actually use. If you need the developer portal, RBAC on the admin interface, vendor support, or specific Enterprise-only plugins, the license buys something real. If you are paying for it and using OSS-equivalent functionality, we will say so. Our health check includes a feature-by-feature read on this — we are not a Kong reseller.

Yes. We deploy Kong Ingress Controller with Ingress or Gateway API resources, configure plugins through custom resources so gateway policy lives alongside application manifests, and set up the control plane and data plane split where hybrid mode fits. The recurring problem we fix is configuration drift between what is in the cluster and what teams think is deployed.

The local policy is fastest and least accurate — counters are per node, so your effective limit multiplies by node count. The cluster policy is accurate but adds datastore load on every request. Redis-backed counters are the usual middle ground for multi-node deployments needing real accuracy. We pick based on how strictly the limit must hold and how much latency budget the route has.

Still have questions about Kong?

Email an Expert

Ready to Get Your API Gateway Under Control?

Whether you need architecture review, a plugin and performance pass, a migration partner, or ongoing managed operations — AceMQ staffs every engagement with a named senior engineer. Get a quote in 24 hours.

Email a Kong Architect
Get in Touch

Talk to a Kong Expert

Send us a message and we'll follow up within one business day — or book a free 30-min consultation directly.

305-204-2607
info@acemq.com
66 W. Flagler St. 9th Floor
Miami, FL 33130

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