API management and service meshes are integral in establishing secure and efficient communication within modern microservices architectures. Companies have been increasingly adopting full lifecycle API management platforms such as Kong to expose APIs safely while also exploring service mesh platforms to enhance internal service-to-service communications, known as East-West traffic. The combination of an API gateway, like Kong Gateway, and a service mesh, like Kong Mesh, facilitates the implementation of a zero-trust security model by providing authentication, authorization, traffic control, and observability across different zones and platforms. These technologies enable the segregation of applications into different meshes for improved isolation and cost reduction, support workload migration, and enhance developer productivity by offloading infrastructure concerns. The integration of API gateways and service meshes helps maintain security and performance, with tools like Kong Konnect offering a global control plane to unify the monitoring and management of both North-South and East-West traffic metrics, thereby allowing businesses to focus more on their core operations rather than technical control planes.