A dynamic, real-time, high-performance cloud-native API gateway and AI gateway for traffic management and service orchestration.
Apache APISIX is a dynamic, real-time, high-performance cloud-native API gateway that manages and orchestrates API traffic. It provides rich features like load balancing, authentication, observability, and security, and can also serve as an AI Gateway for managing LLM traffic. It handles both north-south and east-west traffic, supporting multiple protocols and seamless integration with Kubernetes.
Platform engineers, DevOps teams, and cloud architects building microservices architectures, API platforms, or needing a scalable ingress controller for Kubernetes. It's also suitable for teams implementing AI agent infrastructure requiring robust gateway capabilities.
Developers choose APISIX for its high performance (18k QPS per core), full dynamic configurability without restarts, extensive plugin ecosystem, and multi-language plugin support. Its cloud-native, vendor-agnostic design avoids lock-in and supports complex traffic management scenarios.
The Cloud-Native API Gateway and AI Gateway
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Benchmarks in the README show single-core QPS reaches 18k with average delay under 0.2 milliseconds, making it suitable for high-traffic environments.
Supports hot updates and hot plugins, allowing configuration and plugin changes without restarts for zero-downtime deployments, as highlighted in the features.
Proxies HTTP/HTTPS, gRPC, WebSocket, MQTT, and even HTTP/3 with QUIC, handling diverse traffic needs in modern architectures.
Allows custom plugins written in Lua, Java, Go, Python, Node.js, or WebAssembly, enabling tailored functionality without vendor lock-in.
Platform-agnostic and runs from bare-metal to Kubernetes, with ARM64 support, avoiding vendor lock-in as emphasized in the README.
Requires managing an external etcd cluster for dynamic configuration, adding deployment and maintenance overhead compared to simpler gateways.
Custom plugin development, especially with Lua as the primary language, and understanding APISIX's phase hooks can be challenging for newcomers.
High performance comes with increased memory and CPU usage, and the need for etcd amplifies the infrastructure footprint, which might not suit resource-constrained environments.
Apache APISIX (k) is an open-source alternative to the following products: