apache / apisix

# Apache APISIX API Gateway ｜ AI Gateway
**Apache APISIX** is a dynamic, real-time, high-performance API Gateway.
APISIX API Gateway provides rich traffic management features such as load balancing, dynamic upstream, canary release, circuit breaking, authentication, observability, and more. You can use it to handle traditional north-south traffic, as well as east-west traffic between services. It can also be used as a Kubernetes ingress controller.
## Table of Contents
- Why APISIX
- AI Gateway
- Get Started
- Features
- Benchmark
- Community
- User Stories
- Who Uses APISIX API Gateway?
- Logos
- Acknowledgments
- License
## Why APISIX
APISIX is built on top of NGINX and etcd. Compared with traditional API gateways, APISIX has dynamic routing and hot-loading of plugins, which is especially suitable for API management under a microservice architecture.
The technical architecture of Apache APISIX:
## AI Gateway
APISIX can serve as an **AI Gateway** through its flexible plugin system, providing:
- **AI proxying** to route traffic to different LLM providers through a unified interface.
- **Load balancing, retries, and fallbacks** across multiple LLMs to ensure the efficiency and reliability of AI agents.
- **Token-based rate limiting** to control cost and protect upstream models.
- **Robust security** for authentication, authorization, and traffic control on AI workloads.
## Get Started
Install and run APISIX with a single command using the quickstart script (requires Docker):
 [code] 
This starts APISIX (listening on port `9080`) together with its etcd configuration store. Verify it is running:
 [code] 
Create your first route via the Admin API (port `9180`) to proxy requests to an upstream service:
 [code] 
Send a request through APISIX to confirm the route works:
 [code] 
To learn more, follow the Getting Started guide and the installation documentation for other deployment methods. To extend APISIX, see the plugin development guide, the plugin concept, and the REST Admin API reference.
For more documents, please refer to the Apache APISIX Documentation site.
## Features
You can use APISIX API Gateway as a traffic entrance to process all business data, including dynamic routing, dynamic upstream, dynamic certificates,
A/B testing, canary release, blue-green deployment, limit rate, defense against malicious attacks, metrics, monitoring alarms, service observability, service governance, etc.
- **All platforms**
 - Cloud-Native: Platform agnostic, No vendor lock-in, APISIX API Gateway can run from bare-metal to Kubernetes.
 - Supports ARM64: Don't worry about the lock-in of the infra technology.
- **Multi protocols**
 - TCP/UDP Proxy: Dynamic TCP/UDP proxy.
 - Dubbo Proxy: Dynamic HTTP to Dubbo proxy.
 - Dynamic MQTT Proxy: Supports to load balance MQTT by `client_id`, both support MQTT 3.1.\*, 5.0.
 - gRPC proxy: Proxying gRPC traffic.
 - gRPC Web Proxy: Proxying gRPC Web traffic to gRPC Service.
 - gRPC transcoding: Supports protocol transcoding s