Kong and AWS Advance AI Governance for the Agentic Era

/ AI Governance, AWS re:Invent 2025, Cloud, Security
Kong and AWS Advance AI Governance for the Agentic Era

The News

At AWS re:Invent 2025, Kong discussed its expanding partnership with AWS, emphasizing AI governance, agent-safe connectivity, and the role of Kong’s AI Gateway as enterprises scale into multi-agent architectures. The conversation highlighted how AWS and Kong are aligning around secure, infrastructure-level controls for AI workloads across regulated and global environments.

Analysis

The Infrastructure Layer Becomes the AI Governance Layer

Enterprise development teams are sprinting into agent-driven architectures, but most organizations lack the unified controls needed to protect the data flowing through those agents. ECI and theCUBE Research data shows that 68.3% of organizations rank security and compliance as a top spending priority and 44.5% expect to increase IAM investments. These are clear signs that the governance challenge is intensifying. At the same time, 70.1% plan to adopt more AI/ML in the next year, which widens the risk surface dramatically when paired with distributed data sources and autonomous agent activity.

The central issue is fragmentation. Enterprises run data across Postgres, Snowflake, Databricks, internal APIs, and dozens of SaaS platforms. Developers increasingly rely on LLM-powered agents to orchestrate tasks across those sources. Without a unifying control point, organizations end up applying governance in inconsistent, disconnected ways. What several leaders at re:Invent referred to as “un-governance.” Kong argues that the gateway layer is where consistency can finally be enforced.

Why Kong’s AWS Alignment Matters

Kong frames its AI Gateway as the point where all agentic requests converge, and AWS positions Kong as a complement when customers in regulated industries need deeper enterprise connectivity than native services provide. This approach reflects a broader pattern we’re seeing in our data of 75.5% of teams lean heavily on automation to ensure configuration consistency, but automation only works when the system has complete visibility and policy coverage. Gateways (API or AI) sit at the intersection of that traffic, giving them unique leverage for consistent controls.

AWS is, for many enterprises, the gravitational center of their cloud strategy. Kong’s role as a co-sell partner and validated Marketplace integration gives them proximity to enterprise transformation efforts that increasingly involve agent frameworks, vector databases, and fine-tuned models. At re:Invent, the conversation emphasized that Kong does not compete with the hyperscaler layer, but rather it strengthens it where customers need specialized enterprise governance and portability across clouds.

How Developers May Navigate The Market Moving Forward

The Kong–AWS narrative suggests a directional shift where governance will move from being an attribute of each service to being a capability enforced at the infrastructure layer where requests originate. For developers, this could mean:

  • Unified trust boundaries instead of scattered access policies.
  • Portable, platform-agnostic controls that reduce the burden of multi-cloud policy replication.
  • Faster onboarding for citizen developers and line-of-business builders, because guardrails are automatically enforced.
  • Reduced governance debt as agents grow in number and complexity.

Developers should not expect a single vendor to “solve governance,” but they may increasingly rely on gateway-level governance to create predictable, repeatable enforcement across rapidly evolving AI ecosystems. As agent frameworks and LLM plugins proliferate, shifting governance closer to request origination may help reduce risk and accelerate adoption, though results will vary depending on team maturity, architectural patterns, and regulatory pressure.

Looking Ahead

AI governance continues to be one of the most urgent challenges in the market, and agentic systems magnify that urgency. With 74.3% of organizations planning to increase AI/ML spend and 62.7% prioritizing security and compliance, the demand for unified enforcement layers will likely accelerate over the next 12–24 months.

Kong’s alignment with AWS positions both companies to capture this shift. AWS brings ecosystem breadth; Kong brings deep connectivity and policy control. If they execute well, this partnership could become a reference pattern for how enterprises standardize governance across AI agents, APIs, microservices, and multi-cloud environments. Expect Kong to iterate rapidly on its AI Gateway, expanding support for new agent frameworks, integrating more AWS services, and strengthening portability across clouds as regulatory pressure increases globally.

Author

  • Paul Nashawaty

    Paul Nashawaty, Practice Leader and Lead Principal Analyst, specializes in application modernization across build, release and operations. With a wealth of expertise in digital transformation initiatives spanning front-end and back-end systems, he also possesses comprehensive knowledge of the underlying infrastructure ecosystem crucial for supporting modernization endeavors. With over 25 years of experience, Paul has a proven track record in implementing effective go-to-market strategies, including the identification of new market channels, the growth and cultivation of partner ecosystems, and the successful execution of strategic plans resulting in positive business outcomes for his clients.

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