Apache APISIX

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What's Apache APISIX?

Apache APISIX is a dynamic, real-time, high-performance API gateway, based on the Nginx library and etcd.

APISIX provides rich traffic management features such as load balancing, dynamic upstream, canary release, circuit breaking, authentication, observability, and more.

You can use Apache APISIX to handle traditional north-south traffic, as well as east-west traffic between services. It can also be used as a k8s ingress controller.

The technical architecture of Apache APISIX:

Contents

• Features
• Documentation
• Get Started
• Benchmark
• Apache APISIX vs Kong
• Community
• Videos And Articles
• User Stories
• Who Uses APISIX?
• Landscape
• Logos
• Contributing
• Acknowledgments
• License

Features

You can use Apache APISIX as a traffic entrance to process all business data, including dynamic routing, dynamic upstream, dynamic certificates, A/B testing, canary release, blue-green deployment, limit rate, defense against malicious attacks, metrics, monitoring alarms, service observability, service governance, etc.

• All platforms

  • Cloud-Native: Platform agnostic, No vendor lock-in, APISIX can run from bare-metal to Kubernetes.
  • Run Environment: Both OpenResty and Tengine are supported.
  • Supports ARM64: Don't worry about the lock-in of the infra technology.

• Multi protocols

  • TCP/UDP Proxy: Dynamic TCP/UDP proxy.
  • Dynamic MQTT Proxy: Supports to load balance MQTT by client_id, both support MQTT 3.1.*, 5.0.
  • gRPC proxy: Proxying gRPC traffic.
  • gRPC transcoding: Supports protocol transcoding so that clients can access your gRPC API by using HTTP/JSON.
  • Proxy Websocket
  • Proxy Protocol
  • Proxy Dubbo: Dubbo Proxy based on Tengine.
  • HTTP(S) Forward Proxy
  • SSL: Dynamically load an SSL certificate.

• Full dynamic

  • Hot Updates And Hot Plugins: Continuously updates its configurations and plugins without restarts!
  • Proxy Rewrite: Support rewrite the host, uri, schema, enable_websocket, headers of the request before send to upstream.
  • Response Rewrite: Set customized response status code, body and header to the client.
  • Serverless: Invoke functions in each phase in APISIX.
  • Dynamic Load Balancing: Round-robin load balancing with weight.
  • Hash-based Load Balancing: Load balance with consistent hashing sessions.
  • Health Checks: Enable health check on the upstream node, and will automatically filter unhealthy nodes during load balancing to ensure system stability.
  • Circuit-Breaker: Intelligent tracking of unhealthy upstream services.
  • Proxy Mirror: Provides the ability to mirror client requests.

• Fine-grained routing

  • Supports full path matching and prefix matching
  • Support all Nginx built-in variables as conditions for routing, so you can use cookie, args, etc. as routing conditions to implement canary release, A/B testing, etc.
  • Support various operators as judgment conditions for routing, for example {"arg_age", ">", 24}
  • Support custom route matching function
  • IPv6: Use IPv6 to match route.
  • Support TTL
  • Support priority
  • Support Batch Http Requests

• Security

  • Authentications: key-auth, JWT, basic-auth, wolf-rbac
  • IP Whitelist/Blacklist
  • Referer Whitelist/Blacklist
  • IdP: Support external authentication services, such as Auth0, okta, etc., users can use this to connect to OAuth 2.0 and other authentication methods.
  • Limit-req
  • Limit-count
  • Limit-concurrency
  • Anti-ReDoS(Regular expression Denial of Service): Built-in policies to Anti ReDoS without configuration.
  • CORS Enable CORS(Cross-origin resource sharing) for your API.
  • URI Blocker: Block client request by URI.
  • Request Validator

• OPS friendly

  • OpenTracing: support Apache Skywalking and Zipkin
  • works with external service discovery：In addition to the built-in etcd, it also supports Consul and Nacos DNS discovery mode, and Eureka
  • Monitoring And Metrics: Prometheus
  • Clustering: APISIX nodes are stateless, creates clustering of the configuration center, please refer to etcd Clustering Guide.
  • High availability: support to configure multiple etcd addresses in the same cluster.
  • Dashboard
  • Version Control: Supports rollbacks of operations.
  • CLI: start\stop\reload APISIX through the command line.
  • Stand-alone mode: Supports to load route rules from local yaml file, it is more friendly such as under the kubernetes(k8s).
  • Global Rule: Allows to run any plugin for all request, eg: limit rate, IP filter etc.
  • High performance: The single-core QPS reaches 18k with an average delay of less than 0.2 milliseconds.
  • Fault Injection
  • REST Admin API: Using the REST Admin API to control Apache APISIX, which only allows 127.0.0.1 access by default, you can modify the allow_admin field in conf/config.yaml to specify a list of IPs that are allowed to call the Admin API. Also note that the Admin API uses key auth to verify the identity of the caller. The admin_key field in conf/config.yaml needs to be modified before deployment to ensure security.
  • External Loggers: Export access logs to external log management tools. (HTTP Logger, TCP Logger, Kafka Logger, UDP Logger)

• Highly scalable

  • Custom plugins: Allows hooking of common phases, such as rewrite, access, header filer, body filter and log, also allows to hook the balancer stage.
  • Custom load balancing algorithms: You can use custom load balancing algorithms during the balancer phase.
  • Custom routing: Support users to implement routing algorithms themselves.

Documentation

Document Indexing for Apache APISIX

Get Started

Configure and Installation

APISIX Installed and tested in the following systems:

CentOS 7, Ubuntu 16.04, Ubuntu 18.04, Debian 9, Debian 10, macOS, ARM64 Ubuntu 18.04

There are several ways to install the Apache Release version of APISIX:

1. Source code compilation (applicable to all systems)

   • Installation runtime dependencies: OpenResty and etcd, and compilation dependencies: luarocks. Refer to install dependencies documentation
   • Download the latest source code release package:

     $ mkdir apisix-2.1
     $ wget https://downloads.apache.org/apisix/2.1/apache-apisix-2.1-src.tgz
     $ tar zxvf apache-apisix-2.1-src.tgz -C apisix-2.1
     

   • Install the dependencies：

     $ make deps
     

   • check version of APISIX:

     $ ./bin/apisix version
     

   • start APISIX:

     $ ./bin/apisix start
     

2. Docker image （applicable to all systems）

   By default, the latest Apache release package will be pulled:

   $ docker pull apache/apisix
   

   The Docker image does not include etcd, you can refer to docker compose example to start a test cluster.

3. RPM package（only for CentOS 7）

   • Installation runtime dependencies: OpenResty and etcd, refer to install dependencies documentation
   • install APISIX：

   $ sudo yum install -y https://github.com/apache/apisix/releases/download/2.1/apisix-2.1-0.el7.noarch.rpm
   

   • check version of APISIX:

     $ apisix version
     

   • start APISIX:

     $ apisix start
     

Note: Apache APISIX would not support the v2 protocol of etcd anymore since APISIX v2.0, and the minimum etcd version supported is v3.4.0. Please update etcd when needed. If you need to migrate your data from etcd v2 to v3, please follow etcd migration guide.

For Developer

1. For developers, you can use the latest master branch to experience more features

   • build from source code

   $ git clone git@github.com:apache/apisix.git
   $ cd apisix
   $ make deps
   

   • Docker image

   $ git clone https://github.com/apache/apisix-docker.git
   $ cd apisix-docker
   $ sudo docker build -f alpine-dev/Dockerfile .
   

2. Getting start

   The getting started guide is a great way to learn the basics of APISIX, just follow the steps in Getting Started.

   Further, you can follow the documentation to try more plugins.

3. Admin API

   Apache APISIX provides REST Admin API to dynamic control the Apache APISIX cluster.

4. Plugin development

   You can refer to plugin development guide, and sample plugin echo documentation and code implementation.

   Please note that Apache APISIX plugins' added, updated, deleted, etc. are hot loaded, without restarting the service.

For more documents, please refer to Apache APISIX Document Index

Benchmark

Using AWS's 8 core server, APISIX's QPS reach to 140,000 with a latency of only 0.2 ms.

benckmark script, test method and process has been open source, welcome to try and contribute.

Apache APISIX vs Kong

Both of them have been covered core features of API gateway

Features	Apache APISIX	KONG
Dynamic upstream	Yes	Yes
Dynamic router	Yes	Yes
Health check	Yes	Yes
Dynamic SSL	Yes	Yes
L4 and L7 proxy	Yes	Yes
Opentracing	Yes	Yes
Custom plugin	Yes	Yes
REST API	Yes	Yes
CLI	Yes	Yes

The advantages of Apache APISIX

Features	Apache APISIX	Kong
Belongs to	Apache Software Foundation	Kong Inc.
Tech Architecture	Nginx + etcd	Nginx + postgres
Communication channels	Mail list, Wechat group, QQ group, GitHub, meetup	GitHub, freenode, forum
Single-core CPU, QPS(enable limit-count and prometheus plugins)	18000	1700
Latency	0.2 ms	2 ms
Dubbo	Yes	No
Configuration rollback	Yes	No
Route with TTL	Yes	No
Plug-in hot loading	Yes	No
Custom LB and route	Yes	No
REST API <--> gRPC transcoding	Yes	No
Tengine	Yes	No
MQTT	Yes	No
Configuration effective time	Event driven, < 1ms	polling, 5 seconds
Dashboard	Yes	No
IdP	Yes	No
Configuration Center HA	Yes	No
Speed limit for a specified time window	Yes	No
Support any Nginx variable as routing condition	Yes	No

Benchmark comparison test details data

Community

• Mailing List: Mail to dev-subscribe@apisix.apache.org, follow the reply to subscribe the mailing list.
• QQ Group - 578997126, 552030619
• Slack Workspace - join #apisix on our Slack to meet the team and ask questions
• - follow and interact with us using hashtag #ApacheAPISIX
• bilibili video

Contributor Over Time

Videos And Articles

• Apache APISIX: How to implement plugin orchestration in API Gateway
• Improve Apache APISIX observability with Apache Skywalking
• APISIX technology selection, testing and continuous integration
• Analysis of Excellent Performance of Apache APISIX Microservices Gateway

User Stories

• European Factory Platform: API Security Gateway – Using APISIX in the eFactory Platform
• ke.com: How to Build a Gateway Based on Apache APISIX(Chinese)
• 360: Apache APISIX Practice in OPS Platform(Chinese)
• HelloTalk: Exploring Globalization Based on OpenResty and Apache APISIX(Chinese)
• Tencent Cloud: Why choose Apache APISIX to implement the k8s ingress controller?(Chinese)
• aispeech: Why we create a new k8s ingress controller?(Chinese)

Who Uses APISIX?

A wide variety of companies and organizations use APISIX for research, production and commercial product, including:

Users are encouraged to add themselves to the Powered By page.

Landscape

  

APISIX enriches the CNCF API Gateway Landscape.

Logos

• Apache APISIX logo(PNG)
• Apache APISIX logo source

Contributing

We welcome all kinds of contributions from the open-source community, individuals and partners.

• Contributing Guide

Acknowledgments

Inspired by Kong and Orange.

License

Apache 2.0 License