Traefik

Traefik is a modern cloud-native reverse proxy and load balancer that has become the most widely adopted API gateway in the world, with over 3.4 billion pulls on Docker Hub, ranking in the top 15 most pulled images, and 50,000 stars on GitHub. Recognized as the number one API Gateway by OSS Insight from 2019 to present and receiving Gartner Magic Quadrant Honorable Mention for API Management in 2023, 2024, and 2025, the platform serves as the default Kubernetes ingress controller for distributions including K3s, RKE2, NKP, IKS, and MicroK8s. The latest architecture unifies three gateway types into a single binary: an API Gateway for routing HTTP, gRPC, TCP, UDP, and WebSocket traffic with weighted and header-based routing, canaries, blue-green deployments, and traffic mirroring; an AI Gateway with token rate limits, parallel LLM guard middleware, and content guard regex and NLP engines for governing OpenAI, Anthropic, and on-prem model traffic; and an MCP Gateway providing tool-based access control for agent and MCP server traffic. The platform supports over 90 percent of real-world Ingress NGINX annotations natively, enabling zero-rewrite migration with existing YAML configurations and ModSecurity WAF rule compatibility. Authentication and policy enforcement include OAuth2, OIDC, JWT, mutual TLS, and OPA-compatible authorization at the edge. First-class OpenTelemetry observability provides streaming OTLP metrics, traces, and structured access logs. Built-in API management includes catalog, lifecycle, versioning, developer portal, and multi-cluster federation with OpenAPI schema validation at the gateway. Enterprise customers include NASA, Siemens, Mozilla, eBay, Expedia, Dell, Staples, and Port of Rotterdam. The project is open source under the MIT license with Traefik Labs providing enterprise support.