apisix VS etcd

Through this intelligent caching mechanism, APISIX efficiently utilizes system resources when handling a large volume of requests, thereby improving overall system performance and stability. APISIX, with its advanced LRU cache, provides developers with a reliable and efficient API gateway solution, facilitating smooth communication with external services.

The main issue is that priority is documented in the config-default.yaml file, while the phase is buried in the code. Worse, some plugins run across different phases. For example, let's check the proxy proxy-rewrite plugin and, more precisely, the functions defined there:

// references: // https://github.com/tetratelabs/proxy-wasm-go-sdk/tree/main/examples // https://github.com/apache/apisix/blob/master/t/wasm/ package main import ( "github.com/tetratelabs/proxy-wasm-go-sdk/proxywasm" "github.com/tetratelabs/proxy-wasm-go-sdk/proxywasm/types" "github.com/valyala/fastjson" ) func main() { proxywasm.SetVMContext(&vmContext{}) } // each plugin has its own VMContext. // it is responsible for creating multiple PluginContexts for each route. type vmContext struct { types.DefaultVMContext } // each route has its own PluginContext. // it corresponds to one instance of the plugin. func (*vmContext) NewPluginContext(contextID uint32) types.PluginContext { return &pluginContext{} } type header struct { Name string Value string } type pluginContext struct { types.DefaultPluginContext Headers []header } func (ctx *pluginContext) OnPluginStart(pluginConfigurationSize int) types.OnPluginStartStatus { data, err := proxywasm.GetPluginConfiguration() if err != nil { proxywasm.LogErrorf("error reading plugin configuration: %v", err) return types.OnPluginStartStatusFailed } var p fastjson.Parser v, err := p.ParseBytes(data) if err != nil { proxywasm.LogErrorf("error decoding plugin configuration: %v", err) return types.OnPluginStartStatusFailed } headers := v.GetArray("headers") ctx.Headers = make([]header, len(headers)) for i, hdr := range headers { ctx.Headers[i] = header{ Name: string(hdr.GetStringBytes("name")), Value: string(hdr.GetStringBytes("value")), } } return types.OnPluginStartStatusOK } // each HTTP request to a route has its own HTTPContext func (ctx *pluginContext) NewHttpContext(contextID uint32) types.HttpContext { return &httpContext{parent: ctx} } type httpContext struct { types.DefaultHttpContext parent *pluginContext } func (ctx *httpContext) OnHttpResponseHeaders(numHeaders int, endOfStream bool) types.Action { plugin := ctx.parent for _, hdr := range plugin.Headers { proxywasm.ReplaceHttpResponseHeader(hdr.Name, hdr.Value) } return types.ActionContinue }

API7 takes Apache APISIX as its robust foundation, which is open-source and has an active community with over 600 contributors all over the world. The nature of open source allows users to examine the source code, which promotes transparency. This transparency helps users understand how APISIX works, verify its security, and identify and fix any potential vulnerabilities or bugs.

But the best part is that the libraries mentioned here and Apache APISIX are entirely open source, meaning you can look under the hood and modify things yourself.

Default configuration

4. Plugin definition: It is a really important part of plugin implementation that we define as a table with properties for the version, priority, name, and schema. The name and schema are the plugin's name and schema defined earlier. The version and priority are used by APISIX to manage the plugin. The version typically refers to the version that is currently in use like API versioning. If you publish and update your plugin logic, it is going to be 1.1 (You can set any version you wish). But you need to be very careful in choosing priority. The priority field defines in which order and phase your plugin should be executed. For example, the 'ip-restriction' plugin, with a priority of 3000, will be executed before the 'example-plugin', which has a priority of 0. This is due to the higher priority value of the 'ip-restriction' plugin. If you're developing your own plugin, make sure that you followed the order of plugins not to mess up the order of existing plugins. You can check the order of existing plugins in the config-default.yaml file and open the Apache APISIX Plugin Development Guide to determine.

Their use of etcd was a hard pass for me; I don't need more etcd in my life

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

Grafana configuration. Most of it comes from the configuration provided by APISIX.

sudo dnf -y install curl wget vim ETCD_RELEASE=$(curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/etcd-io/etcd/releases/latest|grep tag_name | cut -d '"' -f 4) echo $ETCD_RELEASE wget https://github.com/etcd-io/etcd/releases/download/${ETCD_RELEASE}/etcd-${ETCD_RELEASE}-linux-amd64.tar.gz tar xvf etcd-${ETCD_RELEASE}-linux-amd64.tar.gz cd etcd-${ETCD_RELEASE}-linux-amd64 sudo mv etcd* /usr/local/bin ls /usr/local/bin /usr/local/bin/etcd --version

Reading the standard library will give you ideas/insight about various Go idiomatic patterns/approaches, and you can see a full website/API implementation in the pkg.go.dev repository (https://github.com/golang/pkgsite). Projects like https://github.com/etcd-io/etcd may be interesting too.

Failure Detection and Recovery It’s not enough to have backup systems. It’s also crucial to detect failures quickly. Modern systems employ monitoring tools and rely on distributed coordination systems such as Zookeeper or etcd to identify faults in real-time: once detected, recovery mechanisms are triggered to restore the service.

Service Discovery: Microservices need to discover and communicate with each other dynamically. Service discovery tools like etcd, Consul, or Kubernetes built-in service discovery mechanisms help locate and connect to microservices running on different nodes within the infrastructure.

APISIX uses etcd to store and synchronize configurations.

etcd is an excellent key-value distributed database used internally by Kubernetes and managed by the CNCF. It's a great option, and that's the reason why Apache APISIX uses it too. Yet, it's not devoid of issues.

Someone on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36682595) suggested etcd (https://etcd.io)

In traditional mode, APISIX stores its configuration in etcd. APISIX offers a rich API to access and update the configuration, the Admin API. In standalone mode, the configuration is just plain YAML. It's the approach for GitOps practitioners: you'd store your configuration in a Git repo, watch it via your favorite tool (e.g., Argo CD or Tekton), and the latter would propagate the changes to APISIX nodes upon changes. APISIX reloads its configuration every second or so.

I am not sure neither. But this might overcome the etcd's soft storage limit of 8GB? [1]

[1] https://github.com/etcd-io/etcd/issues/9771