An HTTP API exposes backend services over HTTP, with routes and routing rules managed in the Cloud-native API Gateway console.
What is an HTTP API?
An HTTP API routes requests to backend services based on the HTTP protocol. Use HTTP APIs to expose services quickly in Kubernetes Ingress, microservices, and AI (SSE) scenarios.
Kubernetes Ingress: An Ingress manages externally accessible resources in a Kubernetes cluster and provides Layer 7 load balancing. Cloud-native API Gateway Ingress instances are built on API gateways and offer more powerful ingress traffic management than standard NGINX Ingress gateways. They are compatible with more than 50 NGINX Ingress annotations, cover more than 90% of NGINX Ingress use cases, support canary releases across multiple service versions simultaneously, and provide flexible service governance and comprehensive security protection.
Microservices routing: When you don't need fine-grained API management between systems, configure routes to define which backend service handles each request. Route paths are intentionally coarse-grained (for example,
/user/*), letting you set up access paths quickly without per-API overhead.
HTTP APIs are designed for development and O&M teams that need to split business logic and implement service interactions rapidly, reducing call complexity between systems.
Create an HTTP API
An HTTP API is an HTTP-based interface that exposes internal services of distributed systems to external callers. Cloud-native API Gateway provides two methods to create HTTP APIs. For more information, see Create an HTTP API.
Routing modes
Cloud-native API Gateway supports five routing modes: single-service routing, weighted routing, tag-based routing, mock routing, and redirection. When a request arrives, the gateway matches it against configured routing rules in priority order. To create and configure routes in the console, see Create a route.