// the find
apache/apisix
The Cloud-Native API Gateway and AI Gateway
Apache APISIX is a mature, high-performance API gateway built on NGINX/OpenResty and etcd, with a huge plugin ecosystem covering auth, traffic control, observability, and now LLM/AI proxying. It's aimed at platform/infra teams running microservices or Kubernetes ingress who need a dynamic gateway that doesn't require reloads to change config.
Plugin architecture is genuinely dynamic - routes and plugins hot-reload via etcd without restarting workers, which matters a lot in production. The plugin count is enormous and covers real-world needs (multiple auth schemes, several logging backends, multi-language plugin runners for Java/Go/Python, Wasm support). The newer ai-proxy/ai-providers code shows they're actually building out protocol conversion (Anthropic, Bedrock, OpenAI-compatible) rather than just slapping an LLM label on it. Apache governance means slower but more stable release cadence and less risk of a single maintainer disappearing.
It's Lua/OpenResty - debugging and extending plugins requires understanding LuaJIT and nginx internals, which is a steeper curve than most gateways written in Go. etcd is a hard dependency for the standard deployment mode, adding an extra stateful service to operate even for small setups. The plugin directory is sprawling (100+ files) which makes it hard to know which plugins are battle-tested vs. recently bolted on, especially the AI ones which are clearly new and rapidly evolving. Admin API security defaults to localhost-only, which is good, but the overall attack surface from having so many enabled protocols (MQTT, Dubbo, gRPC transcoding, etc.) makes threat modeling harder for adopters who only need basic HTTP routing.