APIG Ingress is an enterprise-grade gateway built on open-source Higress. Compatible with Nginx Ingress, it supports API management and microservice scenarios.
Ingress concepts
In a Kubernetes cluster, an Ingress provides Layer 7 load balancing to expose internal services. Forwarding rules route requests to backend Service pods based on request content. Standard Ingress resources support only HTTP rules and lack advanced features such as load balancing algorithms and session affinity. For these capabilities, use an Ingress implementation such as Nginx Ingress or APIG Ingress.
Features of APIG Ingress
How to use APIG Ingress
Built on the cloud-native API gateway, APIG Ingress upgrades MSE Cloud Native Gateway. It supports over 50 Nginx Ingress annotations, covering 90%+ of use cases, plus canary releases, traffic governance, and security protection for large-scale cloud-native applications. APIG Ingress also offers annotations beyond Nginx Ingress compatibility. Advanced usage of APIG Ingress.
After you deploy the APIG Controller, it listens for ApigConfig resources and manages gateway instances, global configurations, and Ingress listener options. The gateway converts Ingress resources into traffic governance configurations that expose internal services. Create and use an APIG Ingress to expose services.
APIG Ingress upgrades MSE Ingress. In regions where both are supported, the ACK console shows only APIG Ingress options. Existing MSE Ingress users can continue creating and managing their MSE Ingresses. To use MSE Ingress, submit a ticket to contact the APIG team.
How APIG Ingress works
Components
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APIG Controller:
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The APIG Controller manages cloud-native API gateway instances and configurations. It operates in bypass mode and does not process service traffic — gateway instances handle all data-plane traffic.
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In the cluster, install the APIG Controller component. Use its ApigConfig CRD to declaratively manage gateway instances and configure Ingress listener options.
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Cloud-native API gateway:
The APIG Controller creates the gateway from the ApigConfig resource. The gateway has a control plane and a data plane.
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Control plane: Listens for Ingress, IngressClass, and Service resources in the associated cluster, parses them, and pushes configurations to the data plane in real time.
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Data plane: Processes external requests based on control-plane rules and forwards them to backend services.
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How it works
The APIG Controller listens for ApigConfig resources in the cluster and maintains the lifecycle and cluster association of each gateway instance.
The gateway control plane retrieves Ingress changes from the API server and updates routing rules. When a request arrives, the gateway matches it against Ingress rules and forwards it to the backend Service pods.
The key Kubernetes resources and components are:
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Service: An abstraction that represents one or more identical backend service instances.
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Ingress: Reverse proxy rules that route HTTP/HTTPS requests to Services based on host and URL path.
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IngressClass: Identifies an Ingress controller implementation. Use the Parameter field to associate an ApigConfig that implements traffic rules from Ingress resources.
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ApigConfig: A CRD provided by the APIG Controller that defines a cloud-native API gateway instance.
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APIG Controller: Manages gateway instances and configurations by listening for ApigConfig resources and coordinating the gateway to implement Ingress traffic rules.
The following diagram shows how the APIG Controller works.
