Higress

Higress is a cloud-native API gateway built on open source Istio and Envoy, designed to unify traffic management, service governance, and security protection in a single platform. Originating from over two years of production-grade Envoy Gateway practice within Alibaba, it provides a high-performance, extensible gateway solution for modern microservices and distributed systems. Its primary purpose is to simplify gateway deployment and operations while ensuring reliable, secure, and observable traffic across heterogeneous environments.

Higress offers deep integration with popular microservice ecosystems, including Dubbo for RPC, Nacos for service discovery and configuration, and Sentinel for traffic control and fault tolerance. It supports advanced traffic routing (e.g., canary releases, blue-green deployments, A/B testing), rate limiting, circuit breaking, and request/response transformation. Built-in security features include authentication, authorization, TLS termination, and protection against common web threats. Its declarative configuration model and Kubernetes-native design make it easy to manage at scale, with strong observability through metrics, logs, and tracing.