Apache APISIX

Apache APISIX is an open-source API Gateway and AI Gateway developed as an Apache Software Foundation top-level project, providing high-performance traffic management for APIs, microservices, and LLM workloads with dynamic routing, load balancing, authentication, observability, and over 100 plugins. Built on NGINX and etcd, the gateway achieves 18,000 queries per second per core with only 0.2 milliseconds of added latency, outperforming traditional API gateways by over 10x in single-core throughput and 10x in latency reduction. The architecture separates Control Plane from Data Plane, with configuration stored in etcd and pushed to NGINX-based data nodes in real time without restarts, enabling dynamic routing updates and hot plugin loading. The AI Gateway capabilities proxy, secure, and govern traffic to over 20 LLM providers including OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS Bedrock, DeepSeek, and Ollama through a single unified endpoint, with LLM load balancing for throughput optimization, automatic retry and fallback to backup models, token-based rate limiting per consumer, prompt security guardrails with content moderation, and Model Context Protocol support for AI agent tool exposure. Integration plugins cover observability via Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, OpenTelemetry, SkyWalking, and Zipkin, logging via Elasticsearch, ClickHouse, Google Cloud Logging, and Apache Kafka, service discovery via Kubernetes, Consul, and Nacos, security via OpenID Connect, Keycloak, Casbin, and HashiCorp Vault, and protocol support for HTTP, gRPC transcoding, WebSockets, Dubbo, and MQTT proxy. Licensed under Apache 2.0 with no paywalled features, the project is fully open source and platform agnostic, running on bare metal, Docker, and Kubernetes across x86 and ARM64. Copyright 2019-2026 The Apache Software Foundation.