Easegress is a cloud-native traffic orchestration platform that functions as a multi-protocol API gateway and service mesh proxy. It routes, transforms, and orchestrates HTTP and MQTT traffic through configurable filter chains, providing high availability, security controls, and resilience for backend services. The platform integrates with service discovery systems like Kubernetes, Consul, and Eureka to dynamically route traffic to discovered services with automatic failover and health monitoring.
The system distinguishes itself through a pipeline-based filter chain architecture where requests pass through a configurable sequence of processing, routing, and transformation steps. It supports canary and blue-green deployment strategies for safe traffic shifting between service versions, and implements circuit breaker, rate limiting, retry, and timeout mechanisms to protect backend services from cascading failures. Security is enforced through JWT, OAuth2, HMAC signature, and IP filter authentication at the pipeline level, while WebAssembly-based custom filter extensions allow users to run their own code for custom request processing and transformation.
The platform provides traffic observability through metrics collection and visualization of latency, throughput, error rates, and status codes for all traffic flowing through the system. It supports hot-update configuration and binary deployment without dropping active connections, and can proxy requests to AI model providers while adapting between different API formats and optionally caching responses in a vector database.