Apache APISIX is a dynamic, real-time, high-performance API gateway and AI gateway.
It is designed for managing APIs and microservices with flexible traffic management, security, observability, and plugin-based extensibility.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Dynamic routing and upstream management
- Load balancing, health checks, and service discovery
- Canary releases, traffic splitting, and blue-green deployment
- Rate limiting, circuit breaking, and request/response transformation
- Authentication, authorization, and security plugins
- Observability with logging, metrics, and distributed tracing
- Hot-loaded plugin architecture
- AI gateway features for managing LLM APIs
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.
Related Software
| Load Balancers | |
|---|---|
| Traefik | Modern HTTP reverse proxy and load balancer |
| HAProxy | High availability layer 7 load balancer and proxy server for TCP and HTTP |
| Cilium | eBPF-based Networking, Observability, Security |
| nginx | Includes a L7 load balancer |
| RoadRunner | High-performance PHP application server, load balancer, and process manager |
| fabio | Fast, modern, zero-conf load balancing HTTP(S) and TCP router |
| BFE | Modern L7 load balancer |
| Envoy | High-performance edge and service proxy built for cloud-native applications |
| APISIX | Real-time API gateway with routing, security and extensive plugin support |
| gobetween | Modern and minimalistic L4 load balancer and reverse-proxy |
| MetalLB | Adds external network service support to bare-metal Kubernetes clusters |
| Seesaw | Linux Virtual Server (LVS) based load balancing platform. L4 load balancer |
| Skipper | HTTP router and reverse proxy with flexible filters and route matching |
| LoxiLB | Cloud-native networking proxy with eBPF acceleration and observability |
| kube-vip | Provides virtual IPs and service networking across Kubernetes clusters |
| nuster | High-performance HTTP proxy cache server and HTTP/TCP load balancer |
| GLB Director | Set of stateless L4 load balancer servers |
| Balance | Generic TCP proxy with round robin load balancing and failover capabilities |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
Explore our carefully curated directory of recommended free and open source software, covering every major software category.The directory forms part of our extensive collection of articles for Linux enthusiasts. It includes hundreds of detailed reviews, together with free and open source alternatives to proprietary software from companies such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. LinuxLinks also covers interesting projects worth exploring, Linux-compatible hardware, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. Know a useful free and open source Linux application that we haven’t covered? Tell us about it using our submission form. |


Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.