Microservices (Application Collaboration / System) • A collection of backend services deployed on Kubernetes. • They rely on Kong Gateway for: o Ingress control o API exposure and routing o Authentication and authorization (OAuth2, JWT, KeyAuth, etc.) o Observability (logging, metrics, tracing) o Security posture enforcement (rate limiting, WAF-type rules) Microservices depend on Kong to expose stable API contracts regardless of internal implementation changes.