Cloud native API Gateway combines a traffic gateway, a microservice gateway, and a security gateway into a single, unified architecture. This eliminates fragmented gateways. The service provides service exposure, traffic management, application traffic ingress, integration, and full lifecycle management for APIs. The gateway delivers performance 1 to 5 times higher than self-built gateways. It is stable and reliable, built on years of technical expertise and proven by events such as the Double 11 shopping festival. It offers multiple layers of security, including mTLS mutual authentication, logon authentication, integration with Web Application Firewall (WAF), and custom security plug-ins. The gateway is also highly extensible and offers a wide range of plug-ins that support hot updates. This makes it a high-performance, secure, and unified gateway.
Why choose Cloud Native API Gateway
Feature | Description |
Open source enhancements | 100% compatible with open source Higress and Nginx Ingress for seamless integration with K8s. It also provides enhanced performance, observability, and ease of use. |
Fully managed service | Provides a fully managed cluster. Focus on business development without worrying about deployment or O&M. The service is professional, elastic, and reliable. |
High availability | Provides instances with comprehensive monitoring and O&M capabilities. It addresses many availability pain points of open source middleware. |
Embraces cloud native | Product components are containerized. It provides a K8s Ingress Controller and is deeply integrated with container services. |
Visualization | Provides a visual interface. This makes your APIs visible, manageable, and controllable. |
Core concepts
Cloud Native API Gateway provides three core API types: REST API, HTTP API, and WebSocket API.
HTTP API
HTTP APIs are route-centric interfaces based on the HTTP protocol. They are suitable for scenarios such as Kubernetes (K8s) Ingress, microservices models, and AI (Server-Sent Events) to quickly expose services.
In a Kubernetes cluster, an Ingress manages external access to cluster services and provides Layer 7 load balancing. The Cloud Native API Gateway Ingress offers a more powerful way to manage Ingress traffic by leveraging the API gateway. It is compatible with Nginx Ingress and more than 50 Nginx Ingress annotations, covering over 90% of Nginx Ingress use cases. It supports phased releases for multiple service versions, flexible service governance, and comprehensive security protection. This meets the traffic governance requirements of large-scale, cloud-native distributed applications.
If fine-grained, API-level management is not required between business systems, you can configure routes to define which backend service handles specific requests. Routing paths, such as /user/*, often have a coarser granularity than API operations. This lets you quickly configure access paths and enable interaction between systems.
HTTP APIs are mainly for development or operations and maintenance (O&M) teams. Routes help you quickly split business logic and enable service interaction. They also provide high flexibility and simplify the call logic between business systems.
REST API
REST APIs are resource-oriented interfaces based on the HTTP protocol. They use standard HTTP methods, such as GET and POST, to operate on resources and are suitable for scenarios such as API First, cross-team collaboration, and fine-grained API management.
API First: A software development methodology that emphasizes designing APIs first when developing applications. In this approach, developers define system boundaries and service interactions by creating APIs before they build the backend services that implement them.
Fine-grained API management: Often used in scenarios where services are exposed to upstream and downstream partners, or for internal and external system access and collaboration. In these scenarios, service providers need to expose specific interfaces and configure interface-level traffic policies. They also need to provide comprehensive API documentation for consumers.
REST APIs are mainly for business-centric development teams. They promote cross-team collaboration, enhance system flexibility, and drive rapid iteration and agile development.
WebSocket API
WebSocket APIs provide a persistent connection protocol interface for bidirectional, real-time communication. They support efficient data transmission and are suitable for applications that require real-time interaction, such as AI, IoT, games, instant messaging, and stock quotes.
The core usage path for WebSocket APIs is the same as for HTTP APIs. They are route-centric and provide a longer default timeout period.
Main features
Feature module | Description | References |
API lifecycle management | Supports full lifecycle management of APIs, including design, development, testing, publishing, and unpublishing. | |
K8s Ingress Controller | Supports K8s Ingress Controller. | None |
Security authentication | Integrates with authentication and logon systems to quickly build a security barrier for your business. It supports HTTPS certificates, IP address blacklists/whitelists, authentication and authorization (including JWT, OIDC, and IDaaS), and unusual traffic scrubbing. | |
Observability | Supports features such as global dashboards, gateway instance monitoring, log retrieval, business TOP lists, log delivery, Tracing Analysis, and alert management. | |
Traffic governance | Supports service governance features such as throttling and degradation, service discovery, service routing, multiple registration centers, traffic tagging, and timeout configuration. | |
Plug-in marketplace | Provides built-in extension plug-ins for authentication, authorization, traffic management, and security protection. You can also upload custom plug-ins to extend gateway capabilities in a flexible and personalized way. | |
High availability | Powered by the Envoy kernel, it integrates K8s Ingress and the microservice gateway. It supports overload protection, seamless publishing and unpublishing, multi-zone disaster recovery, elastic scaling, and automatic fault recovery, with a Service-Level Agreement (SLA) of up to 99.99%. | None |
Billing
For more information, see Product Billing.
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