Advantages of using Kong

Compared to other API gateways and platforms, Kong has many important advantages that are not found in the market today. Choose Kong to ensure your API gateway platform is:

Radically Extensible

Blazingly Fast

Open Source

Platform Agnostic

Manages the full API lifecycle

Cloud Native

RESTful

What area Kongs main components 

Kong server & Kong datastore

Below is some details on the Kong server

The Kong Server, built on top of NGINX, is the server that will actually process the API requests and execute the configured plugins to provide additional functionalities to the underlying APIs before proxying the request upstream.

Kong listens on several ports that must allow external traffic and are by default:

8000

for proxying. This is where Kong listens for HTTP traffic. See proxy_listen.

8443

for proxying HTTPS traffic. See proxy_listen_ssl.

Additionally, those ports are used internally and should be firewalled in production usage:

8001

provides Kong’s Admin API that you can use to operate Kong. See admin_api_listen.

8444

provides Kong’s Admin API over HTTPS. See admin_api_ssl_listen.

references:

https://konghq.com/faqs#:~:text=The%20Kong%20Server%2C%20built%20on,before%20proxying%20the%20request%20upstream.&text=for%20proxying.,Kong%20listens%20for%20HTTP%20traffic.