apache/apisix

What it solves

Apache APISIX is a high-performance, dynamic API gateway designed to manage traffic for microservices architectures. It solves the problem of managing complex routing, security, and observability across diverse services (north-south and east-west traffic) without requiring restarts for configuration updates.

How it works

Built on NGINX and etcd, APISIX uses a dynamic routing system and a flexible plugin architecture. It allows users to define routes and upstreams via an Admin API, which are then hot-loaded into the gateway. It supports a wide range of protocols (HTTP, gRPC, MQTT, TCP/UDP) and provides a multi-language plugin system (Java, Go, Python, Node.js, Wasm) to extend its functionality.

Who it’s for

It is intended for developers and platform engineers managing microservices, Kubernetes ingress, or AI workloads that require scalable, real-time traffic management and security.

Highlights

• AI Gateway Capabilities: Provides AI proxying for LLM providers, token-based rate limiting, and load balancing across multiple LLMs.
• AI Agent Integration: Includes the mcp-bridge plugin to convert stdio-based MCP servers into scalable HTTP SSE services.
• Full Dynamic Configuration: Supports hot updates for routes and plugins without needing to restart the server.
• High Performance: Capable of reaching 140,000 QPS with very low latency (0.2 ms).
• Extensive Protocol Support: Handles everything from HTTP/3 with QUIC to gRPC transcoding and MQTT proxying.