This section outlines the key features supported by APIG. For detailed information on regional availability of each feature, you can refer to the console.
The lifecycle of an API involves creating, publishing, removing, and deleting the API. API lifecycle management enables you to quickly and efficiently expose service capabilities. For details, see Process Flow.
APIG integrates traffic ingress (Kubernetes Ingress) and microservice governance (Kubernetes Gateway API) in one gateway, improving performance, simplifying the architecture, and reducing deployment and O&M costs.
With the built-in debugging tool, you can debug APIs using different HTTP headers and request bodies. This tool simplifies the API development process and reduces the API development and maintenance costs. For details, see Debugging an API.
An API can be published in different environments. Publishing an API again in the same environment will override the API's previous version. APIG displays the publication history (including the version, description, date and time, and environment) of each API. You can roll back an API to any historical version to meet dark launch and version upgrade requirements. For details, see Publishing an API.
Environment variables are manageable and specific to environments. Variables of an API will be replaced by the values of the variables in the environment where the API will be published. You can create variables in different environments to call different backend services using the same API. For details, see (Optional) Configuring the Environment and Environment Variables.
APIG provides visualized, real-time API monitoring, and displays multiple metrics, including number of requests, invocation latency, and number of errors. The metrics help you understand the API usage, allowing you to identify potential service risks. For details, see Configuring an Alarm Rule.
Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) channels (load balance channels) can be created for accessing resources in VPCs and exposing backend services deployed in VPCs. VPC channels balance API requests to backend services and can be connected to servers and microservice registration centers. Backend load balancing and dark launch policies are supported. For details, see (Optional) Creating a Load Balance Channel.
Mock backends simulate API responses for circuit breakers, service degradation, and redirection.
APIG supports HTTP/2, which is a major revision of HTTP and was originally named HTTP 2.0. It features capabilities such as binary framing, multiplexing, and header compression, improving transmission performance to achieve low latency and high throughput.
Unlike HTTP 1.x where data is transmitted in text format, data in HTTP 2.0 is split into messages and frames for binary encoding. Compared with string (text) parsing, binary parsing is easier and less error-prone and delivers higher transmission performance.
With binary encoding, HTTP 2.0 no longer relies on multiple connections to process and send requests and responses concurrently.
For the same domain name, all requests are completed on a single connection, and each connection can process any number of messages. A message consists of one or more frames, which can be sent out of order and finally recombined based on the stream ID in the header of each frame. This shortens the latency and improves the efficiency.
HTTP 2.0 uses an encoder to reduce the size of the headers to transmit. Both the client and server store a header field table to avoid transmitting same headers repeatedly, achieving high throughput.