How AISIX Enterprise Composes
Understand the two independent axes of AISIX Enterprise — control-plane administration and data-plane traffic governance — and how organization, environment, member, and caller API key scopes fit together.
AISIX Enterprise keeps two questions separate that are easy to conflate: who is allowed to change the control plane, and whose traffic is allowed to reach a model. The first is a property of the person — their organization role, plus anything an environment access grant adds on top of it. The second is a property of the caller API key that traffic actually uses — its model allowlist, its team binding, and the budgets and policies attached to it. A member with read-only organization access can still own a caller API key that serves your highest-volume production traffic, and an environment-scoped administrator can gain full write access to an environment's resources without that grant changing what their own key is allowed to call. This page walks through both axes, the organization and environment scopes each one runs inside, and where the two meet.
The Two Axes of AISIX Enterprise
- Control-plane administration governs who can change configuration: create environments, edit models and provider keys, manage members, or assign roles. This axis is enforced through organization roles and environment access grants.
- Data-plane traffic governance governs whose requests reach a model and under what limits: which model aliases a request may use, which team's budget applies, and which guardrails and rate limits run. This axis is enforced through the settings on the caller API key that the request presents.
The two axes are independent. Configuring the control plane does not, by itself, grant traffic access, and holding a productive caller API key does not require any control-plane permissions at all.
Ownership Scopes: Organization and Environment
Both axes run inside the same pair of scopes. An organization is the account-level ownership boundary: it holds members, billing, and provider credentials. An environment groups the resources that reach a specific set of AISIX gateways — models, caller API keys, policies, and cache policies — and is the scope where saved control-plane state turns into live gateway behavior.
See Organizations and Environments for the complete scope model and its resource-ownership diagram.
Who Can Configure the Control Plane: Members, Roles, and Environment Access
Every organization member holds one role — a built-in role or a custom one — that sets their permission baseline across the whole organization. An owner can layer an environment access grant on top of that baseline to extend, but never narrow, what a member can configure inside one specific environment, without changing their access anywhere else.
See Roles and Custom Roles for the built-in roles, the custom-role permission model, and the complete grant-rules table.
Grouping People: Teams
Teams group organization members for ownership, attribution, and shared governance, but the roster by itself attributes no traffic. Only a caller API key that is explicitly bound to a team counts toward that team's budgets, rate limits, or MCP access — a member's personal key does not inherit team controls just because that member appears on the roster.
See Teams for building a roster and binding keys to it.
Who Can Call Models: Caller API Keys, Budgets, and Policies
Live traffic runs through a separate triangle of resources: a caller API key, a model, and the provider key the model resolves to. The caller API key's own settings — not the owning member's organization role — decide which model aliases it may use, which team's controls apply to its traffic, and which budgets and policies are enforced.
See Resource Model for the caller-key/model/provider-key relationship and its diagram.
How the Axes Interact
| Scenario | Control-plane axis | Data-plane axis | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
A member-role user owns a production caller API key | Read-only organization access; cannot edit environments, roles, or provider keys | The key allows prod-chat, is bound to the Payments team, and has a budget attached | The user cannot reconfigure anything, but their key still serves live production traffic under whatever allowlist and budget the key was given |
An owner grants environment-scoped admin on Production | Full read/write over Production's models, caller API keys, guardrails, and policies | The grant holder's own caller API key, if they have one, still allows only the models it was explicitly given | Reconfiguring Production does not grant the admin's own traffic new model access — that is set independently on the caller key |
An organization defines a custom gateway-operator role | Can create and edit models, provider keys, and guardrails; cannot touch members or billing | Can issue caller API keys in any environment the role can write to | Broad configuration power does not pre-authorize traffic: issuing a key still means setting that key's own model allowlist and budget |
| A SCIM group syncs into a team with no bound caller API keys | Unaffected — directory sync manages membership, not control-plane roles | The roster is fully populated, but no request currently presents a key bound to the team | Team budgets and rate limits report no usage until at least one caller API key is explicitly bound to the team |
Putting It Together
The two axes share only one node: the environment. Control-plane administration ends by granting access to an environment; data-plane traffic governance starts from an environment's resources.
Next Steps
Continue with Organizations and Environments to create your first environment, or Roles and Custom Roles to shape control-plane access before inviting members.