The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has announced that Apache ShenYu, an asynchronous, high-performance, and responsive API Gateway for service proxy, protocol conversion, and API governance, has been promoted as a Top-Level Project. It is written in Java, but supports multiple languages such as Python, Go and .NET.

Apache ShenYu supports Apache Dubbo, gRPC, Spring Cloud, WebSocket, MQTT and other protocols as a proxy through a pluggable architecture. Connecting the application client to the ShenYu gateway is realized through the registration center, which involves the registration of the client and the synchronization of the server data. The registry supports HTTP, ZooKeeper, Etcd, Consul, and Nacos.

In traffic management, it supports rate limiter and circuit breaker with the help of plugins like Hystrix and Resilience4 while in the security realm, it supports OAuth 2.0 and JSON Web Token.

The image below shows the architecture of Apache ShenYu

It can be deployed locally or as a provided Docker and Kubernetes deployment. Apache Shenyu Admin is the management system of the gateway, which can manage all plugins, selectors and rules, set users, roles and resources. Currently, it supports MySQL, PostgreSQL and Oracle databases. A dashboard is included in the installation and it is possible to visually configure ShenYu Admin settings. The gateway can record the details of each request that it manages. Request time, request parameters, request path, response result, response status code, time consumption, upstream IP are some of the information it can store in Kafka, ElasticSearch or RocketMQ.

ShenYu entered incubation in May 2021 and, in just over a year, managed to graduate to a Top-Level project of Apache Software Foundation. Apache Incubator helps incoming projects adopt the Apache style of governance and operation and guides them to the ASF.

The Apache Software Foundation, founded in 1999, is the world's largest open source foundation, stewarding 227M+ lines of code and providing more than $22B+ worth of software at 100% no cost.

Starting as a project with a single developer, ShenYu has grown to become very active on Github with almost 300 contributors and 7000 stars.

Apache ShenYu is not the only API gateway project under the Apache umbrella. Apache APISIX is another project that provides a cloud-native architecture, plugins, a dashboard and rich traffic management features.