Apache APISIX

What APISIX does and why it matters

Every request that enters your infrastructure - whether from a mobile app, a partner integration, an internal microservice or a public API consumer - passes through your API gateway. APISIX acts as the intelligent front door, making routing decisions, enforcing authentication, applying rate limits, transforming payloads and collecting observability data, all before the request reaches your application code.

Built on NGINX and etcd, APISIX delivers the raw performance of a battle-tested proxy with the flexibility of a fully dynamic configuration plane. Routes, plugins and upstream targets can be modified through a RESTful admin API without restarts or reloads. In practice, this means you can deploy new API versions, adjust traffic splits and update security policies without any downtime.

APISIX is trusted in production by organisations including Airbus, Zoom, NASA JPL, and the European Commission. It handles the API traffic for some of the highest-throughput platforms on the internet.

How we deploy APISIX for business automation

We integrate APISIX as the central nervous system of your automation platform. When workflows running in Apache Airflow need to call external services, those requests route through APISIX with consistent authentication and retry policies. When event-driven architectures built on Apache Kafka expose webhooks or streaming endpoints, APISIX manages consumer access and throttling. When Apache Superset dashboards pull data from multiple internal APIs, APISIX handles the routing and caching.

This centralised approach means security policies, rate limits and access controls are defined once and enforced everywhere, rather than being scattered across dozens of individual services.

Key capabilities we implement

Dynamic routing and load balancing - route traffic across upstream services with health checks, circuit breakers and weighted distribution. APISIX supports canary releases and blue-green deployments natively, letting you roll out changes safely.

Authentication and authorisation - enforce JWT validation, OAuth 2.0 flows, API key management and LDAP integration at the gateway level. Your application services no longer need to implement their own authentication logic.

Rate limiting and traffic control - protect your services from abuse with granular rate limiting by consumer, route or IP. Implement request throttling, concurrent connection limits and response caching to manage load.

Observability and analytics - export metrics to Prometheus, traces to Jaeger or Zipkin, and logs to your preferred aggregator. Gain complete visibility into API performance, error rates and usage patterns.

Plugin ecosystem - over 80 built-in plugins covering security, traffic management, transformation, logging and serverless execution. Custom plugins can be written in Lua, Go, Java or Python.

APISIX in your automation stack

When combined with Airflow for orchestration, Kafka for event streaming and Superset for analytics, APISIX completes the picture by providing the gateway layer that connects everything securely and reliably. Node designs, deploys and operates this entire stack as an integrated platform.