TykTechnologies/tyk

What it solves

Tyk Gateway is a high-performance, cloud-native API and AI Gateway designed to secure, manage, and govern traffic between clients and backend services. It prevents backend overloads through rate limiting and quotas, ensures security via industry-standard authentication, and provides visibility into API usage through analytics logging.

How it works

It acts as a proxy layer that supports multiple protocols including REST, GraphQL, gRPC, TCP, and the Model Context Protocol (MCP). For AI-specific workloads, it governs MCP traffic from AI agents by parsing JSON-RPC 2.0 to apply authentication and per-tool access control. It also allows the generation of MCP proxies directly from existing REST APIs. The system is extensible via a plugin architecture supporting Python, JavaScript, Go, and gRPC.

Who it’s for

Developers and organizations building cloud-native applications, Open Banking systems, or those deploying AI agents that require a secure, auditable way to manage tool access and LLM traffic.

Highlights

• AI & MCP Support: Dedicated governance for Model Context Protocol traffic, allowing per-tool and per-prompt policy enforcement.
• Multi-Protocol: Native support for REST, GraphQL, gRPC, TCP, and MCP.
• High Performance: Low latency and high requests-per-second (rps) capability on minimal hardware.
• Extensible: Middleware can be customized using plugins written in various languages.
• Enterprise-Ready: Includes built-in features for JWT, bearer tokens, and client certificates.