API7 Gateway
Discover API7 Gateway, a dynamic, high-performance API gateway for cloud-native environments, built on Apache APISIX. Learn about its architecture, features, and deployment models.
API7 API Gateway (referred to as API7 Gateway) is a high-performance API gateway for cloud-native applications and microservices. It is built on Apache APISIX, and it manages, secures, and observes your APIs.
The sections below cover the core concepts, the architecture, the features, and the deployment models, for DevOps engineers and solution architects.
Quick links
Get started
Product Overview, Architecture, Quick Start, Management Options, Enterprise Features, Key Concepts, Tutorials
Deploy and upgrade
Install, System Requirements, Supported Versions, Upgrade, Upgrade Guides
Operate
Run in Production, Kubernetes Production, Best Practices, Platform Administration, Scaling, Performance, Observability
Manage traffic and APIs
How-To Guides, Traffic Management, Protocol Proxy, Operations, gateway groups
Security and compliance
Security Overview, Authentication, Authorization, API Security, API Threat Protection, Platform Security, Compliance
Extend and integrate
AI Traffic, Developer Portal, Plugin Development
Reference
Admin API, Developer Portal API, a7 CLI, ADC, Ports and Endpoints, Configuration, Policies and Templates
Releases and support
Release Notes, Version Support Policy, Troubleshooting, Installation FAQ
Why choose API7 Gateway?
In today's distributed architectures, managing communication between hundreds or even thousands of services creates significant challenges. Organizations need a unified way to handle traffic, enforce security policies, and gain visibility into their API ecosystem without compromising performance. API7 Gateway is engineered to solve these problems.
| Challenge | How API7 Gateway Solves It |
|---|---|
| Complexity in Microservices | Provides a central point of control for routing, load balancing, and managing traffic across diverse upstream services, simplifying the overall architecture. |
| Security and Compliance | Secures APIs with a rich set of authentication and authorization plugins, fine-grained access control, ensuring a strong security posture. |
| Performance Bottlenecks | Delivers exceptional performance with sub-millisecond latency, ensuring that the gateway is never a bottleneck, even under heavy traffic loads. |
| Lack of Observability | Integrates with industry-standard observability tools like Prometheus, Grafana, and OpenTelemetry, offering deep insights into API performance and behavior. |
| Operational Inefficiency | Features a fully dynamic configuration model that allows for real-time updates without service interruptions, enabling agile and efficient operations. |
Core features
API7 Gateway covers the whole API lifecycle.
- Advanced Traffic Management: Control how requests are routed to your services with features like dynamic load balancing, canary releases, blue-green deployments, and circuit breaking.
- Security: Protect your APIs with authentication plugins (OIDC, JWT, HMAC, Key Auth), mutual TLS (mTLS) for transport-layer security, and fine-grained access control to guard against common vulnerabilities.
- Rich Plugin Ecosystem: Extend gateway functionality with a rich set of pre-built plugins or develop custom plugins in Lua to meet specific business requirements.
- Deep Observability: Gain visibility into your API traffic. The gateway supports integration with Prometheus for metrics, OpenTelemetry for distributed tracing, and various logging solutions.
- Platform Agnostic: Deploy API7 Gateway anywhere—on public cloud, private data centers, or hybrid environments. It runs on bare metal, VMs, and Kubernetes.
Architecture overview
API7 Gateway is designed with a decoupled architecture, separating the control plane (CP) from the data plane (DP). The two planes are deployed, scaled, and restarted separately.
- Control plane: The central management point for all configurations. It provides the API7 Dashboard and an Admin API for administrators to define routes, configure plugins, and manage API policies. The control plane pushes configuration changes to the data plane in real-time.
- Data plane: The high-performance traffic proxy that handles all API requests. It receives configurations from the control plane and executes the defined policies, such as authentication, rate limiting, and routing. Data plane nodes are stateless and scale horizontally.
Here is a diagram illustrating the basic architecture:
This decoupled design ensures that even if the control plane is temporarily unavailable, the data plane continues to operate without interruption, guaranteeing high availability for your APIs.
Deployment modes
API7 Enterprise is designed as a container-first platform, ensuring architectural consistency and operational reliability across different infrastructure environments through immutable images.
1. Production-grade orchestration
- Kubernetes (Standard/Managed): The primary deployment path via Helm Charts. API7 Gateway operates as a high-performance, stateless cluster within Kubernetes. In this mode, it maintains its full API Management capabilities, providing advanced traffic control and security policies for services across the enterprise.
- OpenShift: Documented support for Red Hat OpenShift using the same Helm charts as standard Kubernetes. The charts do not ship their own Security Context Constraints (SCC) — you create a service account bound to the built-in
nonroot-v2SCC and clear the security-context defaults on bundled components, as covered in Deploy on OpenShift.
2. Enterprise infrastructure
- Private Cloud / Bare Metal (via Docker): For environments that do not run Kubernetes, API7 is deployed as Docker containers on Linux hosts. This supports both AMD64 and ARM64 architectures, allowing for high-performance execution while maintaining the benefits of container isolation and simplified upgrades.
- Air-Gapped Environments: Specifically optimized for secure, isolated networks. Since API7 is distributed via container images, it simplifies the process of mirroring artifacts into private registries for offline deployment in financial or government sectors.
3. Rapid development & GitOps
- Lightweight Development: API7 provides Docker Compose templates to spin up a full-stack environment (control plane + data plane + API7 Dashboard) in minutes for local development, prototyping, and integration testing.
- GitOps Alignment: All container-based deployments are designed to work with ADC (API Declarative CLI), allowing platform engineers to manage gateway configurations through declarative YAML files and automated CI/CD pipelines.
Key characteristics
API7 Gateway's non-functional characteristics include the following.
- High Performance: Built on a high-performance tech stack (NGINX + LuaJIT), the gateway processes requests with low latency, making it suitable for the most demanding workloads.
- High Availability: The data plane is stateless, which allows it to scale and to stay available. You can run multiple data plane nodes in a cluster to ensure fault tolerance and zero downtime.
- Dynamic Configuration: All configurations, including routes and plugins, are updated dynamically without requiring a reload or restart of the gateway. This enables a truly agile and CI/CD-friendly workflow.
- Extensibility: The plugin mechanism extends the gateway's functionality to integrate with existing systems or implement custom logic.
Next steps
- Get Started: Follow tutorials and quick start guides for hands-on experience with API7 Gateway.
- Install: Find detailed instructions on deploying the gateway on your preferred platform.
- Security and Compliance: Learn how to secure your APIs and meet compliance requirements.