Kong Gateway 2.0 introduces significant enhancements aimed at facilitating large-scale deployments and improving developer experience, operational flexibility, and security. The release features a new Hybrid Mode, which separates the Control Plane and Data Plane, allowing Kong proxies to be deployed securely and efficiently across various environments while centralizing control over configurations. Plugin development is enhanced with Golang PDK support, granting developers the ability to write plugins in Go, which offers a better developer experience and access to a wider range of libraries. The integration of the Automatic Certificate Management Environment (ACME) v2 protocol and Let's Encrypt simplifies HTTPS encryption management, making end-to-end encryption more accessible. Additional improvements include performance enhancements to the Prometheus plugin, extended support for NGINX directive injections, and out-of-the-box compatibility with Kong for Kubernetes 0.7. Users upgrading from older versions are advised to transition first to version 1.5 before moving to 2.0 due to the discontinuation of support for 0.x versions.