Multicloud gateway shared state: what IAM teams need to know

TL;DR: Shared state, regional caching, and centrally governed policy are now core design concerns for API and AI gateways spanning AWS, Azure, and GCP, according to Kong. The identity lesson is that stateful governance, not just request enforcement, becomes the control plane problem when access, quotas, and agent interactions cross clouds.

NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Kong: Configuring Kong Dedicated Cloud Gateways with Managed Redis in a Multi-Cloud Environment

Questions worth separating out

Q: How should security teams govern shared state in multicloud gateways?

A: Security teams should first identify which controls depend on shared state, such as rate limiting, session management, and token accounting.

Q: Why does multicloud architecture make gateway governance harder?

A: Multicloud increases the number of places where policy can drift and state can diverge.

Q: When should organisations use regional caches instead of a global cache?

A: Use regional caches when the control depends on low latency or when the gateway must make local decisions that cannot tolerate cross-cloud round trips.

Practitioner guidance

• Map every gateway policy to its required state dependency Document which controls rely on counters, cache entries, sessions, or token usage data so you can see where regional state is mandatory and where stateless enforcement is sufficient.
• Place enforcement data in the same region as the gateway Keep rate limiting, cache, and quota state close to the data plane that consumes it to avoid latency spikes and inconsistent decisions across clouds.
• Test policy drift across cloud regions Simulate the same request path in AWS, Azure, and GCP to confirm that centralized policy produces the same outcome when regional caches and counters are involved.

What's in the full article

Kong's full blog post covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:

• Step-by-step Konnect workflow for creating Dedicated Cloud Gateways across AWS and Azure.
• Exact Redis add-on configuration examples, including the API payload used to provision managed caches.
• Terraform-oriented deployment patterns for replicating gateway environments across cloud providers.
• Plugin-level configuration details for rate limiting, response caching, and AI token governance.

👉 Read Kong's guide to multicloud gateway configuration with managed Redis →

Multicloud gateway shared state: what IAM teams need to know?

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