🤔 Introducing APISIX AI Gateway – Built for LLMs and AI workloads. Learn More

Apache Software Foundation top-level project

The open-source API Gateway & AI Gateway

High-performance traffic management for APIs, microservices, and LLM workloads — dynamic routing, load balancing, authentication, and observability.

  • 100+open-source plugins
  • ~18kQPS / core
  • 0.2 msadded latency
  • Apache 2.0licensed

Get started with Apache APISIX

Architecture

Dynamic by design, built on NGINX and etcd

Requests flow through a hot-reloadable plugin pipeline; etcd distributes configuration across the cluster in real time, with no restarts.

Apache APISIX architecture diagram
Apache APISIX is based on NGINX and etcd. Compared with traditional API Gateways, APISIX has features like dynamic routing and hot-loading plugins, etc.

Building for large-scale, high value systems

Apache APISIX is an open-source API gateway for routing, securing, and managing traffic to APIs and microservices at scale.

Why APISIX API Gateway?

Reduce time fighting bugs, focus on designing world-class systems with API Gateway

Apache APISIX provides 100+ open-source plugins and gateway-level capabilities for traffic management, security, observability, and protocol handling.

Evaluating open-source options? Compare API gateway architectures, extensibility, Kubernetes support, and operations →

Performance

Ultimate performance

Apache APISIX Gateway uses radixtree-route-matching and etcd under the hood to provide you the ability to create high speed synchronized systems. From routing to built-in plugins, all these are designed and implemented to be uber performant with the minimum latency possible.

Security

Shield against the malicious

Apache APISIX Gateway provides multiple security plugins for identity authentication and API verification, including CORS, JWT, Key Auth, OpenID Connect (OIDC), Keycloak, etc. We put stability and security first.

Scalability and availability

Scales with your users

Apache APISIX Gateway provides the ability to write your own custom plugins, use custom Load Balancing Algorithms during the balancer phase for scaling and custom Routing algorithms for fine control on routing.

Fully dynamic

Save dev-time, design what matters

As API Gateway, Apache APISIX provides Hot updates and Hot plugins, which continuously update configurations without restarts, saving development time and stress. In addition, health checks, circuit breakers, and many more features keep the system balanced.

Multi-platform and protocol

Create once, run anywhere

Apache APISIX can run on bare metal or Kubernetes, giving teams deployment flexibility across infrastructure environments. It supports HTTP-to-gRPC transcoding, WebSocket, gRPC, Dubbo, MQTT proxy, and ARM64.

Try Apache APISIX today.

Getting Started