apache/apisix

Apache APISIX – AI‑Ready API Gateway

What it is – Apache APISIX is an open‑source, high‑performance API gateway built on NGINX and etcd. It sits in front of your services and routes, balances, secures, and monitors traffic. A special AI Gateway mode lets you treat large‑language‑model (LLM) providers as just another upstream, adding rate‑limiting, retries, and cost‑control for AI workloads.

Key capabilities

• Dynamic routing & hot‑reloading – change routes or plug‑ins without restarting.
• Rich traffic management – load‑balancing (round‑robin, hash, custom), canary releases, blue‑green, traffic‑splitting, circuit‑breaker, request/response rewrites.
• Multi‑protocol support – HTTP/HTTPS, gRPC, gRPC‑Web, TCP/UDP, MQTT, Dubbo, WebSocket, HTTP/3 (QUIC).
• Security & auth – JWT, key‑auth, basic‑auth, RBAC, Casbin, Keycloak, IP/Referer whitelists, CSRF, CORS, rate‑limit plugins.
• Observability – Prometheus metrics, Zipkin, SkyWalking, extensive logging (Kafka, Elasticsearch, ClickHouse, etc.).
• Extensible plugins – written in Lua, or external Java/Go/Python via RPC, or WebAssembly (Wasm) using the Proxy Wasm SDK.
• AI‑Gateway features – unified proxy to multiple LLM providers, load‑balancing across models, token‑based rate limiting, secure auth, and fall‑back handling.
• Deployment flexibility – runs standalone, in Docker, on bare metal, or as a Kubernetes Ingress controller; supports ARM64 and cloud‑native environments.

Typical use‑cases

• Expose micro‑services behind a single, centrally managed entry point.
• Provide a secure, observable façade for internal APIs and external partners.
• Deploy AI workloads: route requests to OpenAI, Anthropic, or self‑hosted LLMs, enforce token budgets, and switch between providers automatically.
• Implement A/B testing, canary rollouts, or traffic‑splitting for new service versions.

Getting started – One‑liner Docker quick‑start:

curl -sL https://run.api7.ai/apisix/quickstart | sh

Then use the Admin API (port 9180) to create routes, e.g. proxy /get to httpbin.org.

Community & support – Apache project with active mailing list, Slack, GitHub discussions, and a dedicated dashboard repo. Companies such as NASA JPL, Tencent, and Zoom already run APISIX in production.

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All details are taken directly from the repository’s README.