KrakenD processes over 18,000 requests per second on a single instance while consuming under 50MB of RAM at 1,000 concurrent connections, operating as a stateless API gateway that requires no database whatsoever. The Community Edition has earned over 2,600 GitHub stars by outperforming database-dependent alternatives like Kong and Tyk in independent benchmarks. Written entirely in Go, it uses declarative JSON or YAML configuration files that integrate directly into GitOps workflows for version-controlled infrastructure management. The gateway aggregates responses from multiple backend services into a single API call, transforms request and response payloads with field filtering, grouping, and mapping, and applies zero-trust security policies including JWT validation, OAuth 2.0, CORS, HSTS, clickjacking protection, and XSS prevention. Traffic management features include multi-layer rate limiting at both the router and proxy levels, circuit breakers for backend fault isolation, spike arrest policies, and concurrent call support that requests the same data from multiple backends in parallel for improved response times. Telemetry integrates with OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana dashboards, Datadog, Zipkin, and Jaeger for distributed tracing and metrics collection. The gateway extends through Go plugins, Lua scripting, Martian modifiers, and Google CEL expressions for custom request processing logic. AI workload routing supports OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, and other model endpoints with built-in fallback, retries, and load balancing. Deploy via Docker with the devopsfaith/krakend image as a single binary. 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.

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.