Services and Routes

Key points

• A Service is the upstream you are protecting: a name plus a URL.
• A Route is a rule that says which incoming requests go to that service.
• One service usually has several routes; a route belongs to exactly one service.
• A route matches only when every condition it declares matches the request.
• Nothing is proxied unless some route matches - no match means 404 from Kong, not your service.

Example

_format_version: "3.0"

services:
  - name: orders
    url: http://orders.internal:8080
    routes:
      - name: orders-api
        paths: [ /orders ]
        methods: [ GET, POST ]

  - name: billing
    url: http://billing.internal:8080
    routes:
      - name: billing-api
        paths: [ /billing ]

A Service is where traffic goes; a Route decides what gets sent there. No match, no proxy.