Apache APISIX
By the Apache Software Foundation
Apache APISIX is a dynamic, cloud-native API gateway built on Nginx/OpenResty and etcd, providing routing, authentication, rate limiting, and observability for microservices with configuration changes applied in real time.
Definition
Apache APISIX is a dynamic, cloud-native API gateway built on Nginx/OpenResty and etcd, providing routing, authentication, rate limiting, and observability for microservices with configuration changes applied in real time.
Overview
APISIX was originally developed by engineers in China who later founded the commercial company API7.ai, and was donated to the Apache Software Foundation in 2019, graduating to a top-level project the following year. It was built to address a common limitation of traditional gateways: needing to reload the server to pick up configuration changes. Technically, APISIX runs on top of Nginx and OpenResty (Nginx plus LuaJIT), but stores its routing and plugin configuration in etcd, a distributed key-value store, so changes propagate to all gateway nodes almost instantly without a reload or dropped connections. Functionality is extended through a plugin system covering authentication, rate limiting, request/response transformation, and observability, and APISIX supports HTTP, gRPC, WebSocket, and other protocols. As a gateway designed for cloud-native environments, APISIX ships a native Ingress controller for Kubernetes, letting it sit at the edge of a cluster and route traffic to backend services while enforcing policies centrally. It is commonly discussed alongside other gateways and proxies such as Envoy and Traefik, and using gRPC alongside APISIX is a common pattern for high-performance internal microservice communication — concepts also covered in SkillVeris's API Design & Best Practices course.
Key Features
- Dynamic configuration via etcd — no reload needed for routing changes
- Built on Nginx/OpenResty with LuaJIT for high throughput and low latency
- Extensible plugin architecture for auth, rate limiting, and transformations
- Native Kubernetes Ingress controller support
- Multi-protocol support, including HTTP, gRPC, and WebSocket
- Built-in observability integrations (Prometheus, OpenTelemetry)
- Supports active-active multi-region gateway deployments