Apache APISIX

Apache APISIX is a dynamic, real-time API gateway for north-south traffic at the edge and east-west traffic between services. It also doubles as an AI gateway, proxying LLM traffic for AI agents with retries, fallbacks, token-based rate limiting, and security controls.

It handles load balancing, dynamic upstreams, canary releases, circuit breaking, authentication, and observability, and applies plugin and configuration changes through hot updates without restarts. A mcp-bridge plugin converts stdio-based MCP servers into HTTP SSE services. APISIX proxies TCP, UDP, gRPC, gRPC-Web, MQTT, WebSocket, and HTTP/3 over QUIC, with dynamic SSL certificates.

APISIX runs anywhere from bare metal to Kubernetes, where it also serves as an ingress controller. It is stateless and stores configuration in etcd, with Consul, Nacos, Eureka, and Zookeeper supported for external service discovery. The project is governed by the Apache Software Foundation.