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spring-cloud/spring-cloud-gateway
An API Gateway built on Spring Framework and Spring Boot providing routing and more.
Spring Cloud Gateway is the official Spring project for building API gateways on top of Spring Boot, available in two flavors: a reactive WebFlux variant (the original) and a newer MVC/servlet variant. It handles routing, filtering, and proxying for microservice architectures where Spring is already your stack. If you're not on Spring, look elsewhere.
Deep filter ecosystem out of the box — circuit breaker, rate limiting, JWT relay, request/response body rewriting, gRPC-to-JSON transcoding, all configurable via YAML or code. The dual WebFlux/WebMVC support added in recent releases is genuinely useful: teams that can't or won't run a reactive stack now have a first-class option without switching tools. Native image support via AOT compilation is real and tested, not an afterthought. The Actuator integration exposes live route state at /actuator/gateway, which saves considerable debugging time.
The WebMVC (servlet) variant is significantly behind the WebFlux one in feature coverage — several filters exist only for WebFlux, and the docs don't always make it obvious which is which until you're already wiring things up. Dynamic route updates work, but hot-reloading from external sources (Redis, DB) requires wiring `RouteDefinitionRepository` yourself; there's no turnkey persistent route store. Star count (4.8k) is surprisingly low for a project of this maturity and adoption — it's widely used inside large Spring shops but not something developers 'star' the way they do flashier tools, so the number undersells how production-tested it is. Test ergonomics are mediocre: spinning up a full integration test requires Docker for Redis-backed features, and the test setup boilerplate is heavier than it should be.