apisix-dashboard VS apisix-docker

With various access control models and implementation methods available, constructing an authorization system for backend service APIs can still be challenging. However, the ultimate goal is to ensure that the correct individual has appropriate access to the relevant resource. In this article, we will discuss how to enable the Role-based access control(RBAC) authorization model for your API with open-source API Gateway Apache APISIX and Open Policy Agent (OPA).

The API Create phase is the first stage in the API product lifecycle management process where you design, orchestrate, transform, document, and test your API. At this stage, modern API gateways like Apache APISIX can be helpful to build your API from scratch or import API definitions from a range of sources like OpenAPI YAML/JSON structure to register Route and Upstreams.

Apache APISIX is an API Gateway. By default, it stores its configuration in etcd, a distributed key-value store - the same one used by Kubernetes. Note that in real-world scenarios, we should set up etcd clustering to improve the resiliency of the solution. For this post, we will limit ourselves to a single etcd instance. Apache APISIX offers an admin API via HTTP endpoints. Finally, the gateway forwards calls from the client to an upstream. Here's an overview of the architecture and the required certificates:

One of the key features of modern API Gateways such as Apache APISIX is its support for GraphQL APIs. APISIX makes it easy to manage and scale GraphQL APIs using its flexible configuration system and powerful plugins. One such plugin is the degrapghql plugin, which allows us to convert the GraphQL API into a REST API. In this post, we will explore this feature with an example.

Secure your API: Use an to secure API Gateway by adding authentication, rate limiting, and other security features. It reduces the number of exposed APIs, organizations can reduce surfaces of attacks.

An alternative exists, though, if you're using an API Gateway. I'll describe how to do it with Apache APISIX, but perhaps other gateways can do the same. grpc-transcode is a plugin that allows transcoding REST calls to gRPC and back again.

I've used Kong but currently evaluating APISix as it's a more 'free/open' API gateway.

In this article, we will show you how to create a custom connector for the open-source Apache APISIX API Gateway in Power Platform as an alternative to Azure API Management in case you are building up additional components to an existing system with usable APIs and your system's infrastructure is hosted on-premises or on other cloud services provider rather than Azure.

Here's how to do it with Apache APISIX.

Apache APISIX is an open-source, high-performance API gateway built on top of Nginx. One of its powerful features is the ability to create serverless functions, which are small, stateless programs that can extend the functionality of Apache APISIX. In this article, we'll cover the basics of the Apache APISIX serverless plugin and how it can be used to trigger serverless functions in response to events.

This project leverages existing the pre-defined Docker Compose configuration file to set up, deploy, and run APISIX, etcd, Prometheus, and other services with a single command. First, clone the apisix-docker repo on GitHub, open it in your favorite editor, navigate to the example folder, and start the project by simply running docker compose up command in a terminal from the project root folder.

We will leverage the existing file-proxy demo project on GitHub. It has a quite similar structure to the existing Apisix docker example repo, only we removed unnecessary files to keep the demo simple. The project has 3 folders, docker-compose.yml, and sample openapi.yaml files.

git clone https://github.com/apache/apisix-docker.git

This first thing you clone the apisix-docker project repo from GitHub:

Apache APISIX Apache APISIX is an open source, dynamic, real-time, high-performance cloud native API gateway. APISIX provides rich traffic management features such as load balancing, dynamic upstream, canary release, circuit breaking, authentication, observability, and more. Official website https://apisix.apache.org/ GitHub projects APISIX (the core): https://github.com/apache/apisix GitHub - apache/apisix: The Cloud-Native API Gateway GitHub - apache/apisix-dashboard: Dashboard for Apache APISIX GitHub - apache/apisix-website: Apache APISIX Website GitHub - apache/apisix-docker: the docker for Apache APISIX GitHub - apache/apisix-go-plugin-runner: Go Plugin Runner for APISIX GitHub - apache/apisix-java-plugin-runner: APISIX Plugin Runner in Java GitHub - apache/apisix-python-plugin-runner: Apache APISIX Python plugin runner GitHub - apache/apisix-helm-chart: Apache APISIX Helm Chart GitHub - apache/apisix-ingress-controller: ingress controller for K8s

We made use of Apache APISIX docker compose repo where we deployed several components in one run and we demonstrated how the API Gateway can be used to manage sample ASP.NET Core application to retrieve product data using Product microservice's API. Also, you learned how to enable limit-count plugin for the API endpoint. There are many other built-in plugins available in Apache APISIX, you can check them on Plugin Hub page. Basically, APISIX can be a lightweight middleware API Gateway regardless of which programming language, frameworks, tools, or platforms you are developing a microservice or application.

In this demo, we are using Apache APISIX Docker repo and it contains an example docker-compose.yaml file and with other config files that makes straightforward to start APISIX using docker compose. We try out this example:

APISIX uses etcd to save and synchronize configuration. Before installing APISIX, you need to install etcd on your machine. It would be installed automatically if you choose the Apache APISIX Docker compose mode, you will learn more about on the next blog post Use Docker Compose to deploy containerized APISIX to AWS ECS.

The apisix-security-java-spring project makes use of the similar example APISIX docker compose template.

✔️ Create an Azure resource group. ✔️ Configure Azure Container Instances. ✔️ Create a Azure context for Docker to offload Apisix and etcd containers execution to ACI. ✔️ Get Apache APISIX example source code for Docker from GitHub. ✔️ Modify Docker compose file there. ✔️ Setup volumes in Azure Storage Account with Azure File Share. ✔️ Add APISIX config files to Azure File Share. ✔️ Bring up APISIX in Azure Container Instances. ✔️ Verify APISIX running. ✔️ Cleanup after you finish.