Kong Gateway 3.8 introduces significant advancements in API management, focusing on improved performance, security, extensibility, and ease of use. This release enhances configuration processing, offers new semantic intelligence for AI Gateway, and introduces incremental configuration sync, which reduces data transmission and resource usage during updates. Security is bolstered with new plugins like JSON Threat Protection and upstream-oauth, while observability is improved with full OpenTelemetry support. Additionally, Kong Konnect introduces Konnect Consumers for streamlined service consumer management and a Config Store for centralized secret management. These updates collectively aim to optimize API operations, enhance security, and improve monitoring capabilities, making Kong Gateway 3.8 a robust solution for modern API management challenges.