Hands‑On Evaluation of Alibaba Cloud’s MSE‑Higress Cloud‑Native Gateway

Purchase Process

The author notes that the MSE‑Higress purchase page clearly states that public and private SLB fees are not included, warning that extra costs will be incurred during evaluation and suggesting that the pricing page should list exact fees similar to ACK.

Route Management Experience

After purchasing, an instance is created quickly. The author creates an httpbin service and a route that forwards ${gateway_ip}/httpbin/get to httpbin.org/get. Three match types—prefix, exact, and regex—are supported. The route path must be configured as /httpbin/ (trailing slash) to avoid rewrite issues. A rewrite policy is applied to strip the /httpbin prefix before forwarding to the upstream service.

During debugging, an error occurs because the service’s DNS domain requires a public NAT gateway in the VPC. After adding a NAT gateway, the request succeeds. The curl response is shown in a code block.

Rate‑Limiting Strategy Experience

MSE‑Higress offers six route strategies; the author tests the rate‑limiting strategy by setting QPS to 1. A shell script sends five concurrent requests, and the response shows “sentinel rate limited” confirming the limit works. The author also notes occasional instability in the rate‑limiting monitoring page.

EDAS Microservice Integration Experience

MSE‑Higress supports HTTP, Dubbo, and gRPC protocols. The author deploys a mixed Spring Cloud and Dubbo application on EDAS, creates a Dubbo service interface and a simple @RestController, and configures Nacos discovery with EDAS registry. Service creation in MSE‑Higress abstracts the concept of “source” (registration center) and supports several source types, including EDAS.

The author observes that MSE‑Higress automatically detects the Dubbo protocol from the service name format ( providers:...) without explicit configuration, following a “convention over configuration” approach.

For HTTP‑to‑Dubbo conversion, the author follows the official “Configure HTTP to Dubbo protocol conversion” guide and shows the configuration screenshot.

Canary Release with EDAS

The author adds version metadata ( x-version: v1 and x-version: v2) to both Spring Cloud and Dubbo services, deploys two identical replicas of version 1, then adds a second version and scales to two replicas. Using MSE‑Higress’s label‑based routing, traffic is split 80:20 between v1 and v2. However, the UI does not allow adding Dubbo services to label routing, so the author documents this limitation.

Ten curl requests to /sc-dubbo-mixed-app/echo return a mix of “Hello MSE‑Higress” and “Hello MSE‑Higress V2”, confirming the expected traffic split.

Plugin Market Experience

The author compares MSE‑Higress plugins with APISIX, noting that while both cover common gateway scenarios, MSE‑Higress implements some features (e.g., mock, redirect, CORS, rate limiting) via route configuration rather than plugins, reducing cognitive load for users.

One limitation highlighted is that rate‑limiting is defined at the route level and cannot be scoped to individual consumers.

Improvement Suggestions

Enhance the service model to allow configuring protocol type, unique identifiers for discovery and communication layers, load‑balancing method, and health‑check settings at creation time.

Automatically parse Dubbo service triples for protocol conversion instead of requiring manual mapping.

Support Dubbo services in label‑based routing for canary releases.

Provide clearer guidance on when a canary release is considered complete and integrate the final steps into EDAS.

Update documentation promptly when new features (e.g., shared EDAS registry) are released to avoid user confusion.

Overall Assessment

The author finds MSE‑Higress a solid cloud‑native gateway with fast instance provisioning, comprehensive protocol support, and good integration with Alibaba Cloud services (WAF, EDAS, ACK). The UI is modern and the product benefits from its open‑source Higress heritage. Missing features include serverless support and finer‑grained API management, but the overall outlook is positive.