Apache APISIX

Apache APISIX is a dynamic, real-time API gateway that handles traffic management for microservice architectures. It provides load balancing, dynamic upstreams, canary releases, circuit breaking, authentication and observability, and it can manage both north-south traffic and east-west traffic between services. It can also run as a Kubernetes ingress controller.

APISIX is built on NGINX and etcd. Compared with traditional gateways, it supports dynamic routing and hot-loading of plugins, which suits API management in microservices. Through its plugin system it can act as an AI gateway, proxying traffic to different LLM providers through a single interface, with load balancing, retries and fallbacks across models, and token-based rate limiting to control cost. An mcp-bridge plugin converts stdio-based MCP servers into HTTP SSE services.

The project is developed under the Apache Software Foundation, written mainly in Lua, and released under the Apache 2.0 license. A quickstart script requires Docker and starts APISIX together with its etcd configuration store, after which routes can be created through the Admin API. It is deployed on infrastructure you control.