Higress

Higress is a cloud-native API gateway based on Istio and Envoy. It can be extended with Wasm plugins written in Go, Rust or JavaScript, and comes with dozens of ready-to-use general-purpose plugins plus an out-of-the-box management console.

Its AI gateway capabilities support mainstream model providers, and it can host Model Context Protocol servers through its plugin mechanism so that AI agents can call tools and services. An openapi-to-mcp tool converts OpenAPI specifications into remote MCP servers, and both LLM APIs and MCP APIs are managed together. A Docker quick start exposes the console on port 8001 and the gateway on ports 8080 and 8443.

Higress originated at Alibaba to deal with connection disruption during gateway reloads and to improve gRPC and Dubbo load balancing, and it is now developed as a vendor-neutral CNCF project. The code is written in Go and licensed under Apache-2.0. Documentation includes a blog, roadmap, developer guide and a Wasm plugin hub.