Apache APISIX

Apache APISIX is a dynamic, real-time, high-performance API gateway.

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:

Community

Mailing List: Mail to dev-subscribe@apisix.apache.org, follow the reply to subscribe to the mailing list.
QQ Group - 578997126
Slack Workspace - Please subscribe the mailing list then ask for invitation link
- follow and interact with us using hashtag #ApacheAPISIX
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Good first issues:

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.
- Supports ARM64: Don't worry about the lock-in of the infra technology.
Multi protocols
- TCP/UDP Proxy: Dynamic TCP/UDP proxy.
- Dubbo Proxy: Dynamic HTTP to Dubbo 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
- 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.
- 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.
- Traffic Split: Allows users to incrementally direct percentages of traffic between various upstreams.
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 the route.
- Support TTL
- Support priority
- Support Batch Http Requests
- Support filtering route by GraphQL attributes
Security
- Authentications: key-auth, JWT, basic-auth, wolf-rbac, casbin, keycloak
- 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
- Zipkin tracing: Zipkin
- Open source APM: support Apache SkyWalking
- Works with external service discovery: In addition to the built-in etcd, it also supports Consul and Nacos, 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: 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 fewer 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, RocketMQ Logger, SkyWalking Logger, Alibaba Cloud Logging(SLS), Google Cloud Logging, Splunk HEC Logging)
- Datadog: push custom metrics to the DogStatsD server, comes bundled with Datadog agent, over the UDP protocol. DogStatsD basically is an implementation of StatsD protocol which collects the custom metrics for Apache APISIX agent, aggregates it into a single data point and sends it to the configured Datadog server.
- Helm charts
Highly scalable
- Custom plugins: Allows hooking of common phases, such as rewrite, access, header filter, body filter and log, also allows to hook the balancer stage.
- Plugin can be written in Java/Go/Python
- Plugin can be written with Proxy WASM SDK
- Custom load balancing algorithms: You can use custom load balancing algorithms during the balancer phase.
- Custom routing: Support users to implement routing algorithms themselves.
Multi-Language support
- Apache APISIX is a multi-language gateway for plugin development and provides support via RPC and WASM.
- The RPC way, is the current way. Developers can choose the language according to their needs and after starting an independent process with the RPC, it exchanges data with APISIX through local RPC communication. Till this moment, APISIX has support for Java, Golang, Python and Node.js.
- The WASM or WebAssembly, is an experimental way. APISIX can load and run WASM bytecode via APISIX wasm plugin written with the Proxy WASM SDK. Developers only need to write the code according to the SDK and then compile it into a WASM bytecode that runs on WASM VM with APISIX.
Serverless
- Lua functions: Invoke functions in each phase in APISIX.
- AWS Lambda: Integration with AWS Lambda function as a dynamic upstream to proxy all requests for a particular URI to the AWS API gateway endpoint. Supports authorization via api key and AWS IAM access secret.
- Azure Functions: Seamless integration with Azure Serverless Function as a dynamic upstream to proxy all requests for a particular URI to the Microsoft Azure cloud.
- Apache OpenWhisk: Seamless integration with Apache OpenWhisk as a dynamic upstream to proxy all requests for a particular URI to your own OpenWhisk cluster.

Get Started

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

Please refer to install documentation.
Getting started

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.
Admin API

Apache APISIX provides REST Admin API to dynamically control the Apache APISIX cluster.
Plugin development

You can refer to plugin development guide, and sample plugin example-plugin's code implementation. Reading plugin concept would help you learn more about the plugin.

For more documents, please refer to Apache APISIX Documentation site

Benchmark

Using AWS's eight-core server, APISIX's QPS reaches 140,000 with a latency of only 0.2 ms.

Benchmark 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, Slack, 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
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