Higress is a cloud-native API gateway built upon Istio and Envoy, designed to facilitate seamless integration of AI capabilities into modern applications. It enables developers to write Wasm plugins in languages like Go, Rust, and JavaScript, offering a rich library of ready-to-use plugins and an intuitive console for efficient management.
Key Features and Functionality:
- AI Gateway Capabilities: Higress serves as an AI-native API gateway, supporting AI services such as Tongyi Qianwen APP and machine learning platforms. It provides functionalities like AI observability, multi-model load balancing, AI token flow control, and AI caching.
- Extensibility: With a focus on Wasm plugin extensions, Higress ensures memory safety through sandbox isolation, supports multiple programming languages, and allows independent version upgrades of plugins, achieving lossless hot updates of gateway logic.
- Security and Compliance: Higress offers WAF protection, supports various authentication and authorization strategies such as key-auth, hmac-auth, jwt-auth, basic-auth, and oidc, and integrates with Let's Encrypt for automatic issuance and renewal of free certificates.
- Stream Processing: It supports complete stream processing of request/response bodies, with Wasm plugins easily customizing the handling of streaming protocol messages like SSE (Server-Sent Events), significantly reducing memory overhead in high-bandwidth scenarios.
Primary Value and Problem Solving:
Higress addresses the challenges of integrating AI capabilities into applications by providing a robust, extensible, and secure API gateway. It simplifies the development and deployment of AI services, ensures high availability and performance, and offers comprehensive security features. By supporting AI-native functionalities and streamlining plugin development, Higress empowers enterprises to accelerate their AI transformation and build intelligent applications efficiently.