Categories
Cloud Native Microservices Service Mesh AI Gateway Load Balancer API Gateway Traffic ManagementDeveloper links
Apache APISIX
With 17,000 GitHub stars, 460+ contributors, and deployments across telecommunications, automotive, and financial services running on over 10,000 CPU cores at the largest known installations, Apache APISIX delivers a fully dynamic API gateway achieving 140,000 QPS on eight cores with sub-millisecond latency through NGINX's event-driven architecture and LuaJIT-compiled plugin execution. The 100+ open-source plugins cover authentication (JWT, OAuth 2.0, OIDC, Keycloak, LDAP), observability (Prometheus, Datadog, SkyWalking, OpenTelemetry), traffic management (rate limiting, circuit breaking, canary releases, traffic splitting), and security (CORS, IP restriction, CSRF protection) — all hot-reloadable without process restarts via etcd-based real-time configuration synchronization. Multi-protocol support handles HTTP, gRPC, MQTT, TCP, UDP, and WebSocket traffic for both north-south API access and east-west service mesh communication. AI gateway capabilities proxy requests to 20+ LLM providers with semantic caching, token-aware rate limiting, provider failover routing, and content moderation. Custom plugins extend the gateway in Lua, Go, Java, Python, or WebAssembly. Radixtree route matching handles 100,000+ routes without performance degradation. Functions as a Kubernetes ingress controller with native service discovery for Consul, Nacos, and Eureka. Deploy via Docker or Helm charts with horizontal scaling through etcd cluster coordination. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. Apache 2.0 licensed.
Benefits
- Sub-Millisecond API Latency
- NGINX event-driven core with LuaJIT-compiled plugins achieves 23,000 QPS per CPU core and adds only 0.2ms latency per request — handling 140,000 QPS on a single eight-core server.
- Zero-Downtime Configuration Updates
- etcd-based distributed configuration applies route changes, plugin updates, and upstream modifications across the entire cluster in milliseconds without restarting any gateway processes.
- Hundred Plus Open Plugins
- Pre-built plugins for JWT, OAuth, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, rate limiting, circuit breaking, canary releases, and CORS — with custom plugins in Lua, Go, Java, Python, or Wasm.
- Universal Protocol Gateway
- Single deployment handles HTTP, HTTPS, HTTP/2, gRPC, MQTT, TCP, UDP, and WebSocket traffic for API access, service mesh, IoT endpoints, and streaming connections simultaneously.
Features
- Dynamic Route Matching
- Radixtree algorithm matches requests across 100,000+ routes without performance degradation, supporting URI, host, method, header, and custom variable conditions.
- AI Gateway Proxy
- Routes requests to 20+ LLM providers with semantic caching, token-aware rate limiting, automatic provider failover, and response content moderation built-in.
- Traffic Management
- Canary releases, blue-green deployments, traffic splitting by percentage or header, circuit breaking, health checks, and proxy mirroring for production traffic control.
- Kubernetes Ingress Controller
- Native ingress controller with CRD-based configuration, service discovery for Consul, Nacos, Eureka, and DNS, plus automatic upstream synchronization.
- Multi-Language Plugins
- Extend gateway logic in Lua for in-process speed, or Go, Java, Python, and WebAssembly for external plugin processes with full access to request/response lifecycle hooks.