How Meiqia Scaled Its Cloud‑Native Microservices with the Higress Gateway

Meiqia, a worldwide intelligent cloud‑customer‑service platform, faced growing complexity as dozens of business lines used different programming languages and a legacy routing stack composed of LB, OpenResty, Nginx, Caddy, and SpringCloud‑Gateway. The architecture produced long, fragile traffic paths, difficult fault isolation, and WebSocket services that could not hot‑update routes.

Requirement Background

Multiple business lines using different languages made micro‑service evolution hard.

Multiple traffic‑forwarding middlewares (LB + OpenResty + Nginx + Caddy + SpringCloud‑Gateway) created a convoluted, hard‑to‑debug flow.

WebSocket long‑connections could not be hot‑updated across routing layers, raising maintenance costs.

Goal

Find a unified gateway that handles both traffic and business routing.

Support hot‑update of routing rules to avoid WebSocket reconnection storms.

Provide pre‑flight API permission, signature verification, WAF and CC protection.

Offer a visual backend so non‑technical staff can operate it.

Support private‑cloud deployment in multi‑cloud environments.

Solution Comparison

After a detailed comparison of popular gateway products, Meiqia identified Higress as the best fit, especially for its support of K8s Ingress, WebSocket, Nacos service discovery, hot‑reload routing, and WASM plugins.

Why Higress

Native K8s Ingress support.

WebSocket handling with hot‑reload.

Integration with Nacos for service discovery.

Extensible via WASM plugins.

Meiqia first used Alibaba Cloud's MSE SaaS gateway (the enterprise edition of Higress) in 2021, which offered a fully managed, zero‑ops solution with strong performance and lower cost than self‑built gateways.

To achieve a consistent multi‑cloud architecture, the open‑source Higress edition was adopted for private deployments, extending functionality through custom K8s CRDs.

Implementation Details

Since 2021, Meiqia migrated all services to Kubernetes. The legacy gateway stack required external Nginx‑Ingress‑Controller or SLB load balancers, creating even longer traffic paths. Switching to Higress simplified the flow: public traffic reaches the SLB, then directly routes to the gateway, which forwards to Pods.

Key benefits observed:

Simplified traffic path – SLB → Higress → Pods.

Eliminated self‑hosted Nginx, OpenResty, Caddy, reducing server costs.

Service discovery, health monitoring, and dashboards became visualized.

The control‑plane/data‑plane separation design allowed the Console to manage routing while the Gateway handled requests, improving scalability and fault tolerance.

Meiqia also leveraged a one‑click Helm deployment on K8s nodes:

helm repo add higress.io https://higress.io/helm-charts
helm install higress higress.io/higress -n higress-system --create-namespace

Higress fully replaced Nginx, OpenResty, Caddy, and internal SLB, providing a unified gateway across clouds.

WebSocket Stability

Meiqia's intelligent‑customer‑service product relies heavily on WebSocket for long‑lived connections. Previously, each configuration reload on Nginx caused reconnection storms. Higress’s hot‑update eliminated the need for gateway reloads, preventing disconnections during config changes.

During server upgrades, Higress allowed traffic routing based on pod stage labels, enabling seamless blue‑green deployments.

Rate Limiting and Fault Isolation

In a SaaS scenario, a single tenant may generate a traffic surge that impacts others. Using Higress’s Key Rate Limit plugin, Meiqia set dynamic per‑tenant concurrency limits, adjusting thresholds based on real‑time traffic metrics.

Lessons Learned

Unified traffic and business gateways cut costs and boosted developer efficiency.

The solution became a solid foundation for cloud‑native micro‑service architectures across heterogeneous language stacks.

Hot‑reload routing, lossless upgrades, visual console, open plugins, and Kubernetes/Istio integration opened new evolution paths.

Meiqia concludes that Higress, together with its SaaS counterpart on Alibaba Cloud, offers a powerful, open‑source gateway that bridges public‑cloud and private‑cloud deployments, delivering significant operational and cost benefits.

Community Invitation

Meiqia invites readers to share their production case studies with the Higress community, offering support for gateway migration, media exposure, and participation in open‑source award programs.