Apache APISIX is a cloud-native API gateway for managing traffic between clients and backend services. It provides a central point for enforcing API policies, reducing the need to implement networking and security controls independently in each application.
Built on NGINX and OpenResty, APISIX uses Lua for request processing. In its distributed configuration modes, etcd stores configuration and synchronises changes between gateway nodes. Administrators can manage routes and services through a REST Admin API without restarting the gateway.
APISIX is intended for operators of microservices, public APIs and distributed applications. It can handle traffic entering an organisation as well as communication between internal services, with policies applied at the gateway rather than embedded in application code.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Fine-grained routing based on paths, hostnames, HTTP headers, cookies, request parameters and priorities.
- Weighted round-robin and consistent-hash load balancing with upstream health checks.
- Traffic splitting, canary releases and blue-green deployments for controlled service rollouts.
- Proxy support for HTTP, HTTPS, TCP, UDP, gRPC, WebSocket and MQTT.
- Dynamic TLS certificates, request and response rewriting, and request mirroring.
- Authentication using API keys, JWT, OpenID Connect and other identity integrations.
- Rate limits for request frequency, total requests and concurrent connections.
- IP and referer restrictions, CORS controls, request validation and CSRF protection.
- Circuit breaking and fault injection to test and improve resilience.
- Service discovery through Consul, Nacos, Eureka and other providers.
- Prometheus metrics, distributed tracing, and access log integrations.
- Extensible plugins with support for Lua, Java, Go and Python.
- AI gateway functions including provider proxying, fallback routing and token-based limits.
Website: github.com/apache/apisix
Support:
Developer: Apache Software Foundation
License: Apache License 2.0
Apache APISIX is written in Lua. Learn Lua with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
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