WHAT IS IT?
Apache APISIX is a dynamic API gateway built on top of OpenResty/NGINX and etcd. It handles routing, authentication, rate limiting, observability and load balancing for your APIs and microservices, with hot configuration reloads and zero restarts. It works equally well as a plain reverse proxy, a Kubernetes ingress controller, or an AI gateway.
WHY IS IT INTERESTING?
- Hot-reload configuration: etcd-backed config means route and plugin changes propagate in milliseconds, without ever dropping traffic.
- Massive plugin ecosystem: around a hundred official plugins (JWT, OAuth2, rate limiting, CORS, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, request transforms) plus the ability to write your own in Lua, Go, Java, Python, Node.js or WebAssembly.
- Native multi-protocol: HTTP/HTTPS, HTTP/3 (QUIC), gRPC, WebSocket, TCP/UDP, MQTT, Dubbo. No separate stack needed for non-HTTP protocols.
- OpenResty performance: built on NGINX + LuaJIT, delivering sub-millisecond latencies and throughput that holds up against Go-based alternatives like Kong or Traefik.
- Built-in observability: Prometheus metrics, distributed tracing (Zipkin, SkyWalking, OpenTelemetry) and log shipping to Kafka, Loki or Elasticsearch, all pluggable.
USE CASES
- Kubernetes ingress controller with dedicated CRDs (APISIX Ingress Controller).
- Central API gateway to expose and secure microservices behind a single entry point.
- AI gateway to route, authenticate and throttle access to LLMs or agents via dedicated plugins.
- Reverse proxy with canary releases, circuit breaking and service discovery (Consul, Nacos, Eureka).
- mTLS termination and centralized certificate management across a fleet of internal APIs.