Evolution of the Tianyi Account Gateway System: From Zuul‑Based 1.0 to Kong‑Based 3.0

In 2017 the Tianyi Account team built the first version of their gateway on the open‑source Spring Cloud Zuul component, which provided basic authentication, dynamic routing, and circuit‑breaker capabilities but suffered from performance bottlenecks (≈1k QPS) and limited configurability.

Rapid business growth and large‑scale promotional events (e.g., 2021 Spring Red‑Packet and Double‑11) exposed these limitations, prompting a redesign. The team evaluated several open‑source gateways (Kong, Orange, Tyk, Zuul 2) and chose to extend Kong because of its low learning curve, high performance, and extensibility.

Version 2.0 migrated the gateway to Kong v0.14, introduced a suite of ~30 custom plugins (encryption, logging, parameter conversion, protocol handling, rate‑limiting, etc.), and adopted Go for high‑concurrency upstream services. Performance tests showed single‑node QPS reaching 12‑13 k, and after disabling non‑essential plugins, >13 k QPS.

Subsequent upgrades to Kong v1.3 (2.1) and later to Kong v2.4 (3.0) added CP/DP mixed deployment, multi‑language plugin support (Lua, JavaScript, Go), UDP proxying, and a Consul‑based service‑discovery layer. New plugins such as DP cache control and traffic‑mirroring were developed to enable zero‑impact testing.

Version 3.0 achieved >20 k QPS per node, 99.96 % SLA, automatic DNS‑based failover across hybrid‑cloud nodes, and seamless scaling via Alibaba Cloud ACK. The architecture now handles ten‑million‑level daily requests with sub‑20 ms tail latency.

Overall, the gateway’s evolution demonstrates a 20‑fold performance improvement, unified traffic control, high availability through hybrid‑cloud design, and a standardized plugin ecosystem that supports diverse business scenarios.