Secure microservices with Kong and Ory

Microservice architecture has become a prevalent standard in backend development, and API gateways serve as essential connectors between microservices and user-accessible APIs. This tutorial explores the integration of the Kong API Gateway, Ory Kratos, and Ory Oathkeeper to create a scalable and vendor-independent API gateway solution. Kong, built on OpenResty and Lua, offers non-blocking I/O capabilities, making it suitable for managing traffic between microservices like the simple "hello" and "world" services demonstrated. Ory Kratos handles authentication processes, supporting various methods such as username/password, MFA, and social logins, while Ory Oathkeeper acts as an identity and access proxy, ensuring only authenticated requests reach the microservices. The setup involves configuring these components using Docker, with Ory Oathkeeper redirecting unauthenticated requests to a login interface and Kong managing ingress load balancing. This configuration exemplifies how to secure microservice access and manage authentication seamlessly, with the source code and detailed setup instructions available on GitHub.