How Higress Serverless Enterprise Cuts Costs 90% and Boosts Auth Performance 30×

Background: a SaaS platform’s infrastructure grew from 200 to about 20,000 API consumers, causing authentication latency to rise from 1 ms p50 to over 50 ms and configuration size to swell dramatically.

Problem: as consumer numbers scale, the authentication chain must keep low latency, high success rate, and controllable configuration cost.

Method: local comparative tests were run between the open‑source self‑built Higress and Alibaba Cloud’s Cloud‑Native API Gateway (Higress Enterprise Serverless). Both used identical runtime, upstream services, and request model, testing consumer counts of 10, 100, 500, 1 000, 5 000, 10 000 and 20 000 with a fixed QPS of 10 for 20 seconds each.

Results:

Latency: at 10 k consumers, enterprise p50 = 1.47 ms versus open‑source 50.32 ms (≈34× slower).

Success rate: at 20 k consumers, enterprise maintained 100 % success while open‑source dropped to 77.14 % (a 22.86‑percentage‑point decline).

Configuration size: at 20 k consumers, enterprise config was 149 B versus open‑source 1.23 MB (≈8 457× larger).

Analysis: the enterprise version decouples consumer scale from the authentication path, keeping per‑request auth cost constant, separating consumer data from execution configuration, and preventing linear growth of plugin configuration. This design yields stable performance even when consumers reach hundreds of thousands.

Cost comparison: a minimal self‑built deployment (2 × 2C4G ECS, NLB, EIP) costs roughly 5 241 CNY per year regardless of traffic. The Serverless edition charges a fixed instance fee plus tiered usage; for 1 M daily calls the annual cost is about 1 945 CNY, a 37 % reduction versus self‑hosted. Across call volumes, Serverless saves 70‑90 % for small users and 30‑50 % for large users.

Conclusion: migrating to Higress Enterprise Serverless provides substantial latency, reliability, configuration‑size, and cost benefits, making it a high‑value upgrade for teams using or planning to use Higress.