apisix-ingress-controller VS apisix-plugin-pipeline-request

My ideas for blog posts inevitably start to dry up after over two years at Apache APISIX. Hence, I did some triage on the APISIX repo. I stumbled upon this one question:

In the world of data management and web services, creating and managing APIs can often be a complex and time-consuming task. However, with the right tools, this process can be significantly simplified. In this article, we will explore how to create APIs for fetching data from ClickHouse tables without writing any code and manage these APIs using APISIX. ClickHouse, a fast and open-source columnar database management system, provides an HTTP interface by default, enabling easy access to data. By integrating this with APISIX, an open-source API gateway, we can not only manage and log our APIs but also leverage a host of features provided by APISIX to enhance our API management capabilities.

This post shows how to implement it with Apache APISIX.

APISIX Ingress Controller is a tool focused on API management, offering high performance and flexible configuration options. If you require more complex routing rules, rate limiting, circuit breaking, and other advanced features, APISIX Ingress Controller may be a better choice. It provides a rich plugin system, allowing integration of plugins through APISIX Ingress CRD using declarative configuration to handle authentication, authorization, monitoring, logging, and other functionalities. This enriches the capabilities of APISIX Ingress Controller and simplifies configuration.

In this post, I'd like to describe how to fix some of them via the Apache APISIX API Gateway.

In the era of digitization, the availability and stability of services are crucial for the success of enterprises. As a key component of microservices architecture, the API gateway plays a significant role. APISIX, an open-source API gateway platform, ensures the continuity and stability of services through its health check mechanism.

Next February will mark the two-year milestone that I'm working for: API7.ai on Apache APISIX. I'm still very pleased about both. It allows me to do things I like a lot, such as writing posts and giving talks.

In early 2021, I started to work on the Apache APISIX project. I have to admit that I had never heard about it before. In this post, I'd like to introduce some Apache projects that are less well-known than HTTPD or Kafka.

Apache APISIX is an API Gateway, which builds upon the OpenResty reverse-proxy to offer a plugin-based architecture. The main benefit of such an architecture is that it brings structure to the configuration of routes. It's a help at scale, when managing hundreds or thousands of routes.

No one will be surprised I'm using apisix-pipeline-request-plugin README for my demos. It implements a plugin architecture and comes bundled with plugins that address most possible requirements. We need a plugin that pipes an HTTP call's output to another HTTP call's input. It's not part of the current out-of-the-box plugin portfolio; however, when no plugin fits your requirement, you can develop your own - or find one that does. My colleague Zeping Bai has developed such a plugin:

An API gateway can be the right place to implement this functionality because it can intercept all client app requests and forward them to intended destinations. We are going to use Apache APISIX as it is a popular open-source API Gateway solution with a bunch of built-in plugins. However, at the time of developing the current blog post, APISIX did not have official support for the pipeline-request plugin. By having the knowledge of custom plugin development capabilities of APISIX, we decided to introduce a new plugin that can offer the same feature. There is a repo on GitHub with source code written in Lua programming language and a description of the pipeline-request plugin.