Getting Started with GraphQL and Kong Gateway

Kong Gateway is an API gateway and platform. That means it is a form of middleware between computing clients and your API-based applications. Kong Gateway quickly and consistently extends the features of your APIs. Some of the popular features deployed through Kong Gateway include authentication, security, traffic control, serverless, analytics & monitoring, request/response transformations, and logging. To learn more about these features, see the for plugins. For more about the benefits of Kong in general, please see the FAQ.

The GraphQL paradigm differs from traditional API-based systems. Depending on the resolver implementation details, one query can potentially generate an arbitrary number of requests. Proxy caching and rate limiting on top of GraphQL is key but usually overlooked as a hard problem to solve, since traditional proxy-caching and rate-limiting is not a good fit for GraphQL.

Kong easily integrates with existing GraphQL infrastructure out of the box. By introspecting the GraphQL schema and queries, Kong provides enterprise-grade proxy-caching and rate-limiting specifically tailored for GraphQL.

After installing and starting Kong Gateway, use the Admin API on port 8001 to add a new Service and Route. In this example, Kong Gateway will reverse proxy every incoming request with the specified incoming host to the associated upstream URL. You can implement very complex routing mechanisms beyond simple host matching.

Proxy caching for GraphQL provides advanced caching over queries.

Protect your upstream GraphQL service with rate limiting. By introspecting your schema, it will analyze query costs and provide an enterprise-grade rate-limiting strategy.

A more advanced strategy is available for GraphQL schemas that enforce quantifier arguments on any connection, providing a good approximation on the number of nodes visited for satisfying a query. Any query without decorated quantifiers has a cost of 1. It is roughly based on .

Read more about rate-limiting here: GraphQL Rate Limiting Advanced Plugin

We have prepared a that will help you build your new GraphQL service on top of Kong and Apollo.