Easegress <!-- omit from toc -->

<a href="https://megaease.com/easegress"> <img src="./docs/imgs/easegress.svg" alt="Easegress logo" title="Easegress" height="175" width="175" align="right"/> </a>

• What is Easegress
• Features
• Getting Started
  • Launch Easegress
  • Reverse Proxy
• Use Cases
• Documentation
• Easegress Portal
  • Screenshots
• Community
• Contributing
• License

What is Easegress

Easegress is a Cloud Native traffic orchestration system designed for:

• High Availability: Built-in Raft consensus & leader election provides 99.99% availability.
• Traffic Orchestration: Simple orchestration of various filters for each traffic pipeline.
• High Performance: Lightweight and essential features speed up the performance.
• Observability: There are many meaningful statistics periodically in a readable way.
• Extensibility: It's easy to develop your own filter or controller with high-level programming language.
• Integration: The simple interfaces make it easy to integrate with other systems, such as Kubernetes Ingress, EaseMesh sidecar, Workflow, etc.

The architecture of Easegress:

And you can check Easegress DeepWiki Page to dive into more details.

Features

• Service Management
  • Multiple protocols:
    • HTTP/1.1
    • HTTP/2
    • HTTP/3(QUIC)
    • MQTT
  • Rich Routing Rules: exact path, path prefix, regular expression of the path, method, headers, clientIPs.
  • Resilience&Fault Tolerance
    • CircuitBreaker: temporarily blocks possible failures.
    • RateLimiter: limits the rate of incoming requests.
    • Retry: repeats failed executions.
    • TimeLimiter: limits the duration of execution.
  • Deployment Management
    • Blue-green Strategy: switches traffic at one time.
    • Canary Strategy: schedules traffic slightly.
  • API Management
    • API Aggregation: aggregates results of multiple APIs.
    • API Orchestration: orchestrates the flow of APIs.
  • Security
    • IP Filter: Limits access to IP addresses.
    • Static HTTPS: static certificate files.
    • API Signature: supports HMAC verification.
    • JWT Verification: verifies JWT Token.
    • OAuth2: validates OAuth/2 requests.
    • Let's Encrypt: automatically manage certificate files.
  • Pipeline-Filter Mechanism
    • Filter Management: makes it easy to develop new filters.
  • Service Mesh
    • Mesh Master: is the control plane to manage the lifecycle of mesh services.
    • Mesh Sidecar: is the data plane as the endpoint to do traffic interception and routing.
    • Mesh Ingress Controller: is the mesh-specific ingress controller to route external traffic to mesh services.

      Notes: This feature is leveraged by EaseMesh

  • Third-Part Integration
    • FaaS integrates with the serverless platform Knative.
    • Service Discovery integrates with Eureka, Consul, Etcd, and Zookeeper.
    • Ingress Controller integrates with Kubernetes as an ingress controller.
• Extensibility
  • WebAssembly executes user developed WebAssembly code.
• High Performance and Availability
  • Adaption: adapts request, response in the handling chain.
  • Validation: headers validation, OAuth2, JWT, and HMAC verification.
  • Load Balance: round-robin, random, weighted random, IP hash, header hash and support sticky sessions.
  • Cache: for the backend servers.
  • Compression: compresses body for the response.
  • Hot-Update: updates both config and binary of Easegress in place without losing connections.
• Operation
  • Easy to Integrate: command line(egctl), Easegress Portal, HTTP clients such as curl, postman, etc.
  • Distributed Tracing
    • Built-in OpenTelemetry, which provides a vendor-neutral API.
  • Observability
    • Node: role(primary, secondary), raft leader status, healthy or not, last heartbeat time, and so on
    • Traffic: in multi-dimension: server and backend.
      • Throughput: total and error statistics of request count, TPS/m1, m5, m15, and error percent, etc.
      • Latency: p25, p50, p75, p95, p98, p99, p999.
      • Data Size: request and response size.
      • Status Codes: HTTP status codes.
      • TopN: sorted by aggregated APIs(only in server dimension).
• AI Integration
  • Proxy: proxy requests to LLM providers like OpenAI, DeepSeek, Anthropic, etc.
  • Anthropic API Adaption: adapts requests and responses in Anthropic API to OpenAI format.
  • Vector Database: integrates with vector databases for caching.
  • Monitoring: provides insights into the performance and usage of AI models.

Getting Started

The basic usage of Easegress is to quickly set up a proxy for the backend servers.

Launch Easegress

Easegress can be installed from pre-built binaries or from source. For details, see Install.

Then we can execute the server:

$ easegress-server
2023-09-06T15:12:49.256+08:00   INFO    cluster/config.go:110   config: advertise-client-urls: ...
...

By default, Easegress opens ports 2379, 2380, and 2381; however, you can modify these settings along with other arguments either in the configuration file or via command-line arguments. For a complete list of arguments, please refer to the easegress-server --help command.

After launching successfully, we could check the status of the one-node cluster.

$ egctl get member
...

$ egctl describe member
...

Reverse Proxy

Assuming you have two backend HTTP services running at 127.0.0.1:9095 and 127.0.0.1:9096, you can initiate an HTTP proxy from port 10080 to these backends using the following command:

$ egctl create httpproxy demo --port 10080 \
  --rule="/pipeline=http://127.0.0.1:9095,http://127.0.0.1:9096"

Then try it:

curl -v 127.0.0.1:10080/pipeline

The request will be forwarded to either 127.0.0.1:9095/pipeline or 127.0.0.1:9096/pipeline, utilizing a round-robin load-balancing policy.

More about getting started with Easegress:

• Quick Start
• Install Easegress
• Main Concepts

Use Cases

The following examples show how to use Easegress for different scenarios.

• API Aggregation - Aggregating many APIs into a single API.
• Cluster Deployment - How to deploy multiple Easegress cluster nodes.
• Canary Release - How to do canary release with Easegress.
• Distributed Tracing - How to do APM tracing - Zipkin.
• FaaS - Supporting Knative FaaS integration
• Flash Sale - How to do high concurrent promotion sales with Easegress
• Kubernetes Ingress Controller - How to integrate with Kubernetes as ingress controller
• LoadBalancer - A number of the strategies of load balancing
• MQTTProxy - An Example to MQTT proxy with Kafka backend.
• Multiple API Orchestration - An Telegram translation bot.
• Performance - Performance optimization - compression, caching etc.
• Pipeline - How to orchestrate HTTP filters for requests/responses handling
• Resilience and Fault Tolerance - CircuitBreaker, RateLimiter, Retry, TimeLimiter, etc. (Porting