Performant, secure, AI-friendly unified gateway
Cloud-native API Gateway is a high-availability and high-performance gateway service with complete disaster recovery and hardware acceleration capabilities. It supports many service types, including AI, container, microservices application, Function Compute function, domain name, and IP address. The service is compatible with Higress and provides an all-in-one plug-in package to help customers expose data assets and services in a unified, standard, and secure manner by using APIs. The service is available in two series: original API Gateway and Cloud-native API Gateway.
High cost performance
The service helps you save hidden costs and ensure overall Return on Investment (ROI) based on its performance, ease of use, stability, and security enhancements.
Performance improvement
Compared with self-built gateways, the service has 90% higher overall performance thanks to a software-hardware integrated architecture that combines servers, OSs, and gateways into one to reduce performance loss.
Enhancements
The service also additionally provide features such as out-of-the-box Web Application Firewall (WAF) protection, authentication, protocol conversion, route-level throttling and degradation, service discovery (of various sources), and plug-in marketplace.
High availability
Designs such as multi-AZ deployment and node self-healing guarantee a gateway service level agreement (SLA) higher than 99.95%.
Openness
The service is compatible with mainstream open-source gateways and provides independent open-source Higress solutions. You can switch between the commercial and community editions.
Ease of use
The service provides a complete and continuously evolving observability system that deeply integrates with cloud services and is O&M-free.
Features
Cloud-native API Gateway
Traffic gateway
Adopts the Envoy kernel that is compatible with Kubernetes Ingress standards for ingress traffic management, including route-based forwarding, security authentication, and protocol conversion.
Microservices gateway
Improves end-to-end stability based on support for various service sources (such as K8s and Nacos) and microservices governance features (such as end-to-end canary release and throttling-based degradation).
Security gateway
Adopts an architecture that separates the control plane from the data plane, a WASM sandbox extension mechanism, and a built-in WAF to minimize security risks. The service supports powerful security capabilities such as certificate management, third-party authentication, and blacklist/whitelist.
AI Gateway
Provides capabilities such as AI plug-in sets, AI security protection, and multi-model adaptation.
API management
Provides API hosting services throughout lifecycle, covering stages of API design, development, testing, publishing, sales, O&M, security control, and unpublishing.
Original API Gateway
API management
Provides productivity tools for each stage of the API lifecycle.
Security enhancements
Provides multiple security mechanisms such as HTTPS access, API authentication, parameter verification, and traffic scrubbing.
Integration with Alibaba Cloud services
The service is deeply integrated with multiple Alibaba Cloud services to improve user experience, such as computing, data, AI output, and dashboard services.
API marketplace
You can provide your APIs for sales on Alibaba Cloud API Marketplace with ease. API Gateway and API Marketplace will take care of the metering, billing, and operational details for you.
Scenarios
Service exposure and traffic control
Cloud-native API Gateway is easy to integrate, use, and scale and hot-updatable. It supports K8s Ingress standards, backend services such as microservices and functions, and discovery methods such as K8s and Nacos.
What it can do
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Traffic management for containers and microservices
As the access layer of Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK), Cloud-native API Gateway is compatible with the Kubernetes Ingress standard and provides fine-grained routing and API control. The service supports one-click import of K8s services or Nacos-registered services and direct use of pod IP addresses for communications. In addition, extensions of core annotations of NGINX Ingress are supported and capabilities such as throttling, warm-up, and canary release are provided.
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Serverless
The service works with Function Compute to provide an ideal serverless computing platform. One function corresponds to one API to quickly provide services based on powerful and easy-to-use authentication and flow control capabilities.
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Multi-active disaster recovery
It functions as a unified access layer for multiple clusters to implement multi-active disaster recovery and other features. The service supports multiple service sources, such as Alibaba Cloud ACK, MSE Nacos, Function Compute, Domain Name System (DNS). It can also accurately route requests by proportion or request content and supports health check and service fallback.
AI application traffic ingress and integration
The service provides high-performance, high-availability, and hot-updatable gateway services for LLM vendors and allows AI application developers to efficiently and quickly builds AI applications with little code.
What it can do
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Central management
Once connected, APIs are available for share at all times to avoid repeated work.
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Unified flow control
Different callers can be centrally managed and throttled.
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Unified permissions
Callers are authorized centrally to simplify O&M.
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Unified monitoring
APIs are the cornerstone of cross-system operations. API Gateway can monitor the traffic of different callers in a unified manner, which significantly improves operation efficiency.
Full-lifecycle API management
This service manages APIs throughout their lifecycles from design and development to publishing and unpublishing. In addition, it supports multiple environments to help teams manage and publish APIs more efficiently and securely, and in turn promotes rapid business iteration and innovation.
What it can do
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Standardized development for efficiency boosting
This service manages APIs throughout their lifecycles from design and development to publishing and unpublishing. In addition, it supports multiple environments to help teams manage and publish APIs more efficiently and securely, and in turn promotes rapid business iteration and innovation.
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Fine-grained API management
In scenarios where upstream systems open capabilities to downstream partners or internal systems interconnect with external ones for collaboration, APIs can be managed in a fine-grained manner to control the scope of opening.
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Multi-environment management
This service supports multiple mutually isolated environments. This way, operations in the development or test environment do not affect business in the production environment and tests or verifications can be performed at different development stages.
Specifications
Cloud-native API Gateway
Performant, secure, AI-friendly unified gateway
Features
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Supports multiple service sources such as Kubernetes and Nacos.
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Adopts the Envoy kernel that is compatible with Kubernetes Ingress standards.
Supports multiple service sources such as Kubernetes and Nacos.
Billing method
Supports purchase by resource plan and by the pay-as-you-go billing method. Fees are charged based on the engine specifications and the number of nodes.
Original API Gateway
Provides full-lifecycle API management.
Features
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Supports in-depth integration with many Alibaba Cloud services.
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Provides productivity tools for each stage of the API lifecycle.
Billing method
Supports purchase by resource plan and by the pay-as-you-go billing method. Fees are charged based on the engine specifications and the number of nodes.
