# Extend API and AI connectivity with Kong Plugins
Hundreds of out-of-the-box plugins to address key use cases, without introducing platform complexity
## Flexible and extensible API
management
Extend functionality with hundreds of plugins created by Kong and our community. Or build your own in Lua, Go, Rust, Javascript or Python.
Reduce time spent on writing redundant code and maintaining libraries with value-add plugins and an intuitive web UI.
Instantly implement functionality for security, authentication, rate limiting, analytics, and more at granular or global scale.
## Why Kong Plugins?
Access advanced functionality to boost developer productivity and ensure operational resilience.
## Enable robust authentication and authorization
- - Devise sophisticated permissions to configure access to Kong services and routes.
- - Implement the latest industry safeguards including OpenID Connect, Key Auth, OAuth, LDAP, Vault, and more.
## Improve security with centralized secrets
- - Store sensitive and repeated information via secrets management integrations.
## Apply rate limiting to your application traffic
- - Reduce production risk by controlling which users can access services and rolling out new software to a subset of users.
- - Provide rate limiting for REST and GraphQL requests.
- - Leverage mock endpoints to test your APIs against your services.
## Provide the best protection for your services
- - Allow or deny IPs that can make requests to your services.
- - Detect and block bots or custom clients.
- - Authorize requests using Open Policy Agent.
## Introduce autoscaling with serverless
- - Invoke and manage AWS Lambda functions, Azure functions, and Apache OpenWhisk from Kong.
- - Run Lua code from Kong to dynamically transform or terminate requests.
## Monitor service health and performance
- - Propagate distributed tracing spans and report space to a OTLP-compatible server.
- - Send request and response logs to various servers including HTTP, TCP, Kafka, UDP, and more.
- - Out-of-the-box integrations to push Kong metrics to external observability tools including Datadog, Prometheus, StatsD and AppDynamics.
## Transform your API landscape
- - Use powerful regular expressions, variables, and templates to transform API requests.
- - Modify the upstream response before returning it to the client.
- - Customize Kong exit responses downstream.
## Address every use
case with custom
plugins
- - Implement custom logic at various entry-points of Kong Gateway’s execution lifecycle.
- - Build bespoke plugins in Lua, Go, Rust, Javascript or Python.
## Customers on Kong Plugins
## Verifone
Kong’s flexible plugin architecture meant we could pick and choose the functionality we needed for each use case, as well as manage APIs across modern and legacy systems.
75%
Reduction in total cost of ownership
## Motley Fool
Kong’s plugin architecture was especially appealing. Rather than needing to custom code for commonly requested services like proxy caching, we could simply apply these policies out-of-the-box.
5x
Faster time to market