Unlock Higress 1.0 RC: A One‑Click Cloud‑Native Gateway with Plugins, Hot Updates, and Full Observability

Introduction

After more than five months of development, Higress released its first Release Candidate (RC) version 1.0.0‑rc, which can be used out‑of‑the‑box through the console as a cloud‑native gateway.

Key Advantages

Ease of use : Provides a quickstart that can be installed locally or deployed in production with a single click, and the console abstracts Ingress/Gateway API details.

Standardization : Aligns with the Kubernetes Ingress/Gateway API standard, inherits the longevity of POSIX‑like standards, and adds rich routing‑policy extensions compatible with most Nginx Ingress features.

High integration : Supports routing to both K8s services and external IPs, and can integrate with service‑discovery systems such as Nacos, ZooKeeper, Spring Cloud, and Dubbo.

Extensibility : Offers a flexible plugin mechanism; official plugins are available in the marketplace and users can upload custom plugins built as Docker/OCI images.

Hot updates : Enables hot‑reloading of routing rules, Wasm plugins, and certificates without connection drops.

Enterprise Support

During the RC phase, the community provides additional assistance through an enterprise support group, where core developers can help with deployment issues.

Installation and Upgrade

Installing the RC version requires Helm. Use the quickstart for a fresh install or run an upgrade with the --devel flag, for example: helm upgrade higress -n higress-system --devel The RC has undergone multiple testing cycles and is ready for production use, with a stable release forthcoming.

Console Feature Overview

Observability : Built‑in Grafana and Prometheus dashboards; users can also connect external monitoring stacks.

Plugin extension : Official plugins are listed in the marketplace; custom plugins can be built as Docker/OCI images and uploaded via the console for zero‑downtime updates.

Service discovery : Supports K8s Service, Nacos, ZooKeeper, static IP, and DNS‑based discovery.

Domain and certificate management : Allows TLS certificate creation and HTTP/HTTPS configuration per domain, with domain‑level plugin activation.

Rich routing capabilities : Discovered services appear in the service list; routes are defined by selecting a domain, match criteria, and target service, with optional per‑route plugins.

Advanced Usage

The console continues to evolve; some Ingress annotation features are not yet supported. Users can refer to the “Ingress Annotation for Advanced Traffic Governance” guide for deeper configurations.

For Istio‑based traffic management, see the “Installation and Deployment” documentation, which explains how to enable Istio CRDs and use the EnvoyFilter API for fine‑grained control.

Community Involvement

Contributors are encouraged to claim open issues labeled “help wanted” on the Higress GitHub repository (https://github.com/alibaba/higress/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+label%3A%22help+wanted%22). Completing a number of issues can earn committer status and community rewards.

References

Quickstart: https://higress.io/zh-cn/docs/user/quickstart/

Spring Cloud integration: https://higress.io/zh-cn/docs/user/spring-cloud/

Dubbo integration: https://higress.io/zh-cn/docs/user/dubbo/

Prometheus observability: https://higress.io/zh-cn/docs/user/prometheus/

Custom plugin development: https://higress.io/zh-cn/docs/plugins/custom/

Ingress annotation guide: https://higress.io/zh-cn/docs/user/annotation-use-case/

Helm deployment: https://higress.io/zh-cn/docs/ops/deploy-by-helm/

EnvoyFilter API: https://istio.io/latest/docs/reference/config/networking/envoy-filter/