Higress: Delivering an Efficient AI Gateway Solution to Simplify Microservice Management and Enhance Security

General Introduction

Higress is a cloud-native API gateway developed by Alibaba, built on Istio and Envoy, designed to provide efficient traffic scheduling, service governance and security solutions. It supports Wasm plug-in extensions for multiple programming languages, and is suitable for a variety of scenarios such as AI business, microservices, and Kubernetes Ingress, with high usability and ease of use.

Function List

• AI Gateway: Supports multi-model load balancing, AI token flow control, AI caching and other features.
• Kubernetes Ingress Gateway: Compatible with K8s Nginx Ingress annotations, supports smooth migration from Ingress API to Gateway API.
• Microservices Gateway: Support for a variety of registries such as Nacos, ZooKeeper, Consul, Eureka , etc. , integrated Dubbo, Nacos, Sentinel and other technology stack .
• Safety Gateway: Provides WAF capability and supports multiple authentication and authentication policies such as key-auth, hmac-auth, jwt-auth, etc.
• Plug-in extensions: Support for Wasm, Lua and other plug-in extension mechanism, plug-ins can be hot updated in real time.
• streaming: Supports fully streaming request/response Body for large bandwidth scenarios.
• consoles: Provides out-of-the-box UI console with support for Grafana and Prometheus observability integration.

Using Help

Installation process

1. Docker Installation::
   • Create a working catalog:mkdir higress; cd higress
   • Start Higress:docker run -d --rm --name higress-ai -v ${PWD}:/data -p 8001:8001 -p 8080:8080 -p 8443:8443 higress-registry.cn-hangzhou.cr.aliyuncs.com/ higress/all-in-one:latest
   • Port Description:
     • Port 8001: Higress UI console portal
     • Port 8080: gateway HTTP protocol portal
     • Port 8443: Gateway HTTPS protocol portal
2. Kubernetes Installation::
   • Deployment with Helm: Refer to the Quick Start documentation on the official website.

Function Operation Guide

1. AI Gateway Features::
   • Interfaces with all domestic and international LLM model vendors through a unified protocol.
   • Configure AI token flow control and AI caching to improve the stability and efficiency of AI services.
2. Kubernetes Ingress Gateway::
   • Compatible with K8s Nginx Ingress annotations, supports smooth migration from Ingress API to Gateway API.
   • Configure K8s Service service discovery to support registries such as Nacos/ZooKeeper.
3. Microservices Gateway::
   • Docking multiple registries and configuring routing rules for service discovery and load balancing.
   • Integrate Dubbo, Nacos, Sentinel and other technology stacks to improve the efficiency of microservice management.
4. Safety Gateway::
   • Configure WAF rules to protect applications from attacks.
   • Supports multiple authentication and authentication policies to ensure access security.
5. Plug-in extensions::
   • Write plug-ins using Wasm, Lua, etc. to extend the gateway functionality.
   • Real-time hot updating of plug-ins to ensure uninterrupted business.
6. streaming::
   • Support streaming processing request/response Body, suitable for large bandwidth scenarios.
   • Customize the processing of messages for streaming protocols such as SSE.
7. Console operation::
   • Access the Higress UI console for gateway configuration and management.
   • Integration with Grafana and Prometheus for observability monitoring.

The layman's guide to getting started with AI

Help you learn how to utilize AI tools at a low cost and from a zero base.AI, like office software, is an essential skill for everyone. Mastering AI will give you an edge in your job search and half the effort in your future work and studies.

View Details>