Kong Gateway, a widely-used API Gateway, is known for its adaptability to various environments and deployment configurations, requiring careful architectural decisions tailored to specific use cases. The article explores several deployment architectures, each suited to different scenarios, ranging from simple single-instance setups to complex multi-instance distributed systems. A single instance in DB-less mode is ideal for local testing with a declarative configuration file serving as the control plane, while single-instance setups with databases allow for more robust management and plugins. Using decK enables a declarative configuration approach even when a database is involved, although it discourages mixing with direct Admin API changes to maintain predictability. For production environments demanding scalability and fault tolerance, multiple instance deployments provide horizontal scalability and resilience through redundancy. A hybrid deployment allows for secure configurations where data planes may not have direct database access, using persistent connections to propagate configurations from the control plane. This flexibility in deployment options highlights Kong's capability to cater to a wide range of requirements, from development to high-demand production environments.