Case Study: iFood achieves a 33% reduction in high-impact incidents and improved platform resilience with Kong Gateway

iFood Improves Platform Resilience and Slashes High-Impact Incidents by 33% with Kong Gateway

iFood, the leading food delivery service in Brazil, faced growing pains from a split monolith, rising system complexity, weak governance of internal solutions, and huge traffic surges that increased manual work to keep services available. To remove bottlenecks and better manage its API surface, iFood chose Kong Gateway (Kong) to decouple services and centralize control of traffic and policies.

Using Kong Gateway and Kong’s Plugin Development Kit, iFood templatized request path transformations and JWT validations, and deployed circuit breaking, rate limiting, and load balancing (with Prometheus-based health checks) to protect backend systems during promotion-driven spikes. The solution gave iFood the agility to focus on new features, supported an anticipated doubling of endpoints over two years, and cut high-impact incidents by 33% (incidents affecting more than 5% of the user base).

iFood

Gabriel Froes

Head of Site Reliability Engineering