Apache APISIX
With 17,000 GitHub stars, 460+ contributors, and deployments across telecommunications, automotive, and financial services running on over 10,000 CPU cores at the largest known installations, Apache APISIX delivers a fully dynamic API gateway achieving 140,000 QPS on eight cores with sub-millisecond latency through NGINX's event-driven architecture and LuaJIT-compiled plugin execution. The 100+ open-source plugins cover authentication (JWT, OAuth 2.0, OIDC, Keycloak, LDAP), observability (Prometheus, Datadog, SkyWalking, OpenTelemetry), traffic management (rate limiting, circuit breaking, canary releases, traffic splitting), and security (CORS, IP restriction, CSRF protection) — all hot-reloadable without process restarts via etcd-based real-time configuration synchronization. Multi-protocol support handles HTTP, gRPC, MQTT, TCP, UDP, and WebSocket traffic for both north-south API access and east-west service mesh communication. AI gateway capabilities proxy requests to 20+ LLM providers with semantic caching, token-aware rate limiting, provider failover routing, and content moderation. Custom plugins extend the gateway in Lua, Go, Java, Python, or WebAssembly. Radixtree route matching handles 100,000+ routes without performance degradation. Functions as a Kubernetes ingress controller with native service discovery for Consul, Nacos, and Eureka. Deploy via Docker or Helm charts with horizontal scaling through etcd cluster coordination. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. Apache 2.0 licensed.
Kong
With over 43,000 GitHub stars and adoption by companies including Nasdaq, Samsung, and Expedia, Kong Gateway is the world's most deployed open-source API gateway, processing billions of API requests daily across hybrid-cloud and multi-cloud architectures. Built on the battle-tested NGINX engine with OpenResty's LuaJIT runtime, Kong delivers sub-millisecond proxy latency while supporting REST, gRPC, GraphQL, WebSocket, SOAP, and Kafka protocols. The plugin architecture includes authentication via JWT, Basic Auth, HMAC, key authentication, OAuth 2.0, and LDAP, alongside rate limiting with configurable windows per consumer, IP address, or API key. The AI Proxy plugin provides a universal LLM API that routes across OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, AWS Bedrock, Azure AI, Databricks, Mistral, and Hugging Face through a single standardized interface, while MCP proxy capabilities convert REST APIs into MCP tools and provide traffic governance for AI agents. Kong supports declarative configuration via YAML for GitOps workflows, a RESTful Admin API for dynamic configuration, and decK CLI for version-controlled infrastructure-as-code management. Upstream health checking with active and passive probes enables automatic failover, and the ring balancer distributes traffic across upstream targets with consistent hashing, round-robin, or least-connections algorithms. The Kong Plugin Hub hosts over 100 community and official plugins covering logging, monitoring, transformation, security, and traffic control. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. Apache 2.0 licensed.