apisix-ingress-controller VS spec

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.

API resilience is about building robust APIs that can withstand a variety of challenges, ensuring that they continue to function effectively. API Gateways play a key role in this, acting as the entry point for external requests and managing the communication between different services by taking into account common API resilience patterns. One of the popular open-source API Gateways, Apache APISIX, provides a variety of features to enhance the resilience and robustness of APIs. In this article, we will explore 10 common API resilience design patterns and how they can be implemented using APISIX.

OWASP also provides Coraza, a port of ModSecurity available as a Go library. Coraza Proxy Wasm is built on top of Coraza and implements the proxy-wasm ABI, which specifies a set of Wasm interfaces for proxies. Finally, Apache APISIX offers proxy-wasm integration.

APISIX supports Wasm through the WebAssembly for Proxies (proxy-wasm) specification. APISIX is a host environment that implements the specification, and developers can use the SDKs available in multiple languages to create plugins.

Hi HN!

For the past few weeks we've been working on Proximal - a workflow engine that lets you quickly iterate on WebAssembly extensions for Envoy Proxy[0] (or other proxies) right on your local machine: https://github.com/apoxy-dev/proximal

This work is based on Proxy-WASM[1] extension ABI for Envoy (and other proxies like APISIX and Mosn[2]) which allows you to execute WebAssembly code on every API request a la Cloudflare Workers. As part of our wider effort at https://apoxy.dev to improve API glue code we built an experimentation / development platform and hope you will find it useful!

On the technical side this project packs Envoy itself, Envoy controller, REST API (for controlling the controller =)), React SPA, and Temporal server/worker (for orchestration) - all baked into a single Go binary. You can find more on architecture and limitations in the repository README[4].

This project is pretty early stage and we would appreciate community feedback!

Previous HN discussions on this topic:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36113542

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22582276

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[0] https://www.envoyproxy.io/

[1] https://github.com/proxy-wasm/spec/blob/master/docs/WebAssem...

[2] https://apisix.apache.org/ https://mosn.io/

[3] https://github.com/apoxy-dev/proximal/blob/main/README.md#ar...

Wasm Labs dev here :)

In mod_wasm, there are some differences with a pure CGI implementation. When Apache boots, it loads the configuration and initializes the WasmVM. When a new HTTP request arrives, the VM is ready so you don't need to initialize a different process to manage it.

You still need to process the request and pass the data to the Wasm module. This step is done via STDIN through the WebAssembly System Interface (WASI) implementation [0]. The same happens in the opposite direction, as the module returns the data via STDOUT.

So, the CGI pattern is still there, but it doesn't require new processes and all the code runs in a sandbox.

However this is not the only way you can run a Wasm module. In this specific case, we use CGI via WASI. In other cases, you may compile a module to fulfill a specific API, like ProxyWasm [1] to create HTTP filters for proxies like Envoy.

- [0] https://wasi.dev/

- [1] https://github.com/proxy-wasm/spec

proxy-wasm spec

The team considered to solve the issue with C++ extensions, but discarded this approach as neither APIs nor ABIs were stable. Instead, they chose to provide a stable WebAssembly-based ABI. If you're interested in a more detailed background, you can read the whole piece on GitHub.