Custom Resources in Kubernetes allow controllers to extend Kubernetes-style declarative APIs that are specific to certain applications.
A few custom resources are bundled with Kong Ingress Controller to configure settings that are specific to Kong and provide fine-grained control over the proxying behavior.
Kong Ingress Controller uses the configuration.konghq.com API group
for storing configuration specific to Kong.
The following CRDs allow users to declaratively configure all aspects of Kong:
The Ingress resource in Kubernetes is a fairly narrow and ambiguous API, and
doesn't offer resources to describe the specifics of proxying.
To overcome this limitation, KongIngress Custom Resource is used as an
"extension" to the existing Ingress API to provide fine-grained control
over proxy behavior.
In other words, KongIngress works in conjunction with
the existing Ingress resource and extends it.
It is not meant as a replacement for the Ingress resource in Kubernetes.
Using KongIngress, all properties of Upstream,
Service and Route
entities in Kong related to an Ingress resource can be modified.
Once a KongIngress resource is created, you can use the configuration.konghq.com
annotation to associate the KongIngress resource with an Ingress or a Service
resource:
- When the annotation is added to the
Ingressresource, the routing configurations are updated, meaning all routes associated with the annotatedIngressare updated to use the values defined in theKongIngress's route section. - When the annotation is added to a
Serviceresource in Kubernetes, the correspondingServiceandUpstreamin Kong are updated to use theproxyandupstreamblocks as defined in the associatedKongIngressresource.
The below diagram shows how the resources are linked with one another:
Kong is designed around an extensible plugin architecture and comes with a wide variety of plugins already bundled inside it. These plugins can be used to modify the request/response or impose restrictions on the traffic.
Once this resource is created, the resource needs to be associated with an
Ingress, Service, or KongConsumer resource in Kubernetes.
For more details, please read the reference documentation on KongPlugin.
The below diagram shows how the KongPlugin resource can be linked to an
Ingress, Service, or KongConsumer:
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KongClusterPlugin resource is exactly same as KongPlugin, except that it is a Kubernetes cluster-level resources instead of being a namespaced resource. This can help when the configuration of the plugin needs to be centralized and the permissions to add/update plugin configuration rests with a different persona than application owners.
This resource can be associated with Ingress, Service or KongConsumer
and can be used in the exact same way as KongPlugin.
A namespaced KongPlugin resource takes priority over a KongClusterPlugin with the same name.
This custom resource configures Consumers in Kong.
Every KongConsumer resource in Kubernetes directly translates to a
Consumer object in Kong.
This Custom Resource is used for exposing non-HTTP and non-GRPC services running inside Kubernetes to the outside world via Kong. This proves to be useful when you want to use a single cloud LoadBalancer for all kinds of traffic into your Kubernetes cluster.
It is very similar to the Ingress resource that ships with Kubernetes.
Once a KongConsumer resource is created,
credentials associated with the Consumer can be provisioned inside Kong
using KongCredential custom resource.
This Custom Resource has been deprecated and will be removed in a future release. Instead, please use secret-based credentials.


