Kong's API gateway is frequently used for API rate limiting, addressing performance, security, and business needs by ensuring service level agreements, preventing DDoS attacks, and differentiating service levels for paying customers. The Kong rate limit advanced plugin offers flexibility by allowing rate limits to be set at various levels, such as service, route, consumer, or globally. However, the need for different rate limits based on organizations, partners, or tenants can be met using Kong's "Consumer Groups" feature introduced in version 2.7, which allows for specific limits to be defined per group while maintaining general rate limit functionality. This enables users to easily configure traffic rate limits tailored to their specific requirements.