An API gateway's role as a single access point for an application's APIs does not necessitate it being a single point of failure, which is where a high availability (HA) cluster becomes essential. HA clusters consist of multiple gateway nodes across different servers or locations, ensuring that if one node fails, others can continue to route requests and maintain service uptime. This setup is crucial for enterprises where downtime in online services, such as e-commerce or banking, can have significant financial and reputational impacts. The use of load balancers helps distribute traffic across nodes, and the addition of a distributed data store aids in maintaining configuration consistency and resilience to hardware failures. Specifically, the Kong API Gateway simplifies the implementation of HA clusters by allowing nodes to share a common data store, thus avoiding the need for configuration replication, and uses a local cache system to enhance performance and maintain eventual consistency. This architecture ensures that applications can effectively handle high traffic volumes and unexpected spikes while remaining operational despite potential hardware failures.