Overview
Higress is a cloud-native API gateway from Alibaba built on Istio and Envoy. It extends gateway capabilities through Wasm plugins and provides AI Gateway features such as MCP hosting and unified multi-model integration for enterprise workloads.
Key Features
- Unified access to multiple model providers with observability, token rate limiting and caching
- MCP server hosting and openapi-to-mcp tooling
- Rich Wasm plugin ecosystem with language-agnostic extensions
Use Cases
- Integrate LLM APIs and MCP services in enterprise API gateways
- Host remote MCP servers with unified auth, rate limiting and auditing
- Provide streaming processing and high availability for AI workloads
Technical Highlights
- Production-grade architecture with zero-downtime config updates
- Wasm plugin sandboxing for safe extensibility
- Enterprise observability, audit and security features