Why APISIX Is the Next‑Generation Cloud‑Native API Gateway

In recent years, China's open‑source enthusiasm has surged, with individuals and enterprises increasingly adopting and contributing to open‑source projects. Among the latest additions to the Apache Software Foundation is APISIX, now an incubating project.

Project Name: APISIX

Project URL: https://github.com/apache/incubator-apisix/

Official Website: https://www.iresty.com/

Project Overview: APISIX is a cloud‑native, high‑performance, extensible microservice API gateway built on OpenResty and etcd. Compared with traditional gateways, it provides dynamic routing and hot‑loading plugins, making it especially suitable for API management in microservice environments.

Why Choose APISIX?

If you are building web, mobile, or IoT applications, you may need an API gateway to handle traffic. APISIX processes both north‑south and east‑west traffic, supports dynamic load balancing, authentication, rate limiting, and allows custom plugin development.

Features

Cloud‑Native: Platform‑agnostic, no vendor lock‑in; runs on bare metal or Kubernetes.

Hot Update & Hot Plugins: Update configuration and plugins without restarting services.

Dynamic Load Balancing: Supports weighted round‑robin.

Consistent Hash Load Balancing: Supports consistent‑hash algorithm.

SSL: Dynamic SSL certificate loading.

HTTP(S) Reverse Proxy

Health Checks: Automatically filters unhealthy upstream nodes.

Circuit Breaker: Tracks unhealthy upstream services.

Authentication: Supports key‑auth, JWT.

Rate Limiting

Request Count Limiting

Concurrency Limiting

Proxy Request Rewrite: Supports rewriting host, uri, schema, enable_websocket, headers.

OpenTracing: Supports Apache SkyWalking and Zipkin.

Monitoring & Metrics: Prometheus integration.

gRPC Protocol Conversion: Allows HTTP/JSON clients to access gRPC APIs.

Serverless: Execute custom functions at any APISIX stage.

Custom Plugins: Mount plugins such as rewrite, access, header filter, body filter, log, and balancer.

Dashboard: Built‑in UI for managing APISIX clusters.

Version Control: Supports multiple rollbacks.

CLI: Command‑line tool for start, stop, restart.

REST API

WebSocket Proxy

IPv6: Supports IPv6 route matching.

Clustering: Stateless nodes; configure etcd clustering for high availability.

Extensibility: Simple plugin mechanism for easy extensions.

High Performance: Achieves up to 24k QPS on a single core with 0.6 ms latency.

ReDoS Defense

IP Blacklist

IdP Support: Integrates external identity providers (Auth0, Okta, etc.) for OAuth2.0.

Standalone Mode: Load routing rules from local files, friendly for Kubernetes environments.

Global Rules: Apply plugins globally (e.g., blacklist, rate limiting).

TCP/UDP Proxy: Dynamic TCP/UDP proxying.

Dynamic MQTT Proxy: Load balances MQTT using client_id, supporting MQTT 3.1.* and 5.0.

For more details, refer to the official documentation at https://github.com/apache/incubator-apisix/blob/master/doc/README_CN.md.