Kong: a Service is the upstream, a Route is how clients reach it

Those two objects are the whole model. A Service points at your backend; one or more Routes decide which incoming requests are sent to it.

Code

curl -i -X POST http://localhost:8001/services \
  --data name=billing \
  --data url=http://billing.internal:8080

curl -i -X POST http://localhost:8001/services/billing/routes \
  --data name=billing-route \
  --data 'paths[]=/billing'

curl -i http://localhost:8000/billing/invoices/42

Output

HTTP/1.1 201 Created    (service)
HTTP/1.1 201 Created    (route)
HTTP/1.1 200 OK         (proxied to billing.internal:8080/invoices/42)

# A Service with no Route is unreachable. A Route must belong to a Service
# (or, from Kong 3.x, it can point straight at an upstream via `service`).

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Published 2026-08-25