We’re thrilled to announce that Higress has formally handed the Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) vote to affix the Cloud Native Computing Basis (CNCF) as a Sandbox challenge, changing into a proud member of the CNCF ecosystem.
What’s Higress?
Higress is an AI-native, high-performance API gateway constructed on Envoy and Istio. It conceptually unifies the site visitors gateway, microservices gateway, and AI gateway right into a single management airplane, drastically decreasing operational complexity for each cloud-native and AI workloads.
Born out of Alibaba’s massive-scale inside manufacturing environments, Higress brings enterprise-grade stability and WebAssembly (Wasm) extensibility to the CNCF ecosystem. At present, its core capabilities are constructed upon two important pillars:
- Ingress controller and gateway capabilities: Higress serves as a extremely mature Kubernetes Ingress Controller, providing full help for the Gateway API and its Inference Extension. With Nginx Ingress scheduled for retirement in 2026[1], Higress gives a safe, drop-in alternative for Nginx Ingress. It stays totally appropriate with mainstream Nginx Ingress annotations whereas changing the weak configuration-injection mannequin with a sturdy xDS management airplane and Wasm sandbox, successfully eliminating the safety dangers inherent to legacy architectures. Whether or not organizations select to take care of current Ingress setups or migrate totally to the Gateway API, Higress delivers unified, extremely scalable site visitors governance.
- AI-native gateway capabilities: Higress treats AI site visitors as a first-class citizen. It gives native help for Giant Language Mannequin (LLM) invocations, the Mannequin Context Protocol (MCP), and numerous AI inference situations. By providing token-based price limiting, multi-model fallback, Retrieval-Augmented Technology (RAG) integration, model-aware routing, and clever load balancing, Higress standardizes how cloud-native purposes devour LLMs. This positions Higress because the definitive entry level for AI Brokers and LLM site visitors.
Buyer adoption
Higress has already confirmed its production-ready reliability throughout a variety of extremely demanding environments. Present enterprise adopters embrace Alibaba Group, Ant Group, BOSS Zhipin, Cathay Insurance coverage, Ctrip, DJI, Kuaishou, Sealos, and Vipshop. These organizations span main industries equivalent to web companies, finance, journey, {hardware}, and leisure. They leverage Higress not just for its strong cloud-native site visitors routing but additionally for deploying AI gateway options on to enterprise AI Agent purposes and MCP companies. Moreover, a rising ecosystem of revolutionary AI open-source tasks, together with HiMarket and HiClaw, are already being constructed on high of Higress.
Why CNCF?
Higress’s entry into the CNCF marks a pivotal milestone in its evolutionary journey, pushed by three core aims:
- Deep ecosystem alignment: The CNCF is dwelling to foundational open-source tasks like Kubernetes and Envoy. Constructed on Envoy and Istio, Higress shares a technical heritage that’s inherently native to this setting. Becoming a member of the CNCF permits Higress to collaborate intimately with these top-tier tasks, co-create technical requirements, and solidify its main function in trendy cloud-native architectures.
- Impartial, community-driven development: The long-term vitality of any open-source challenge depends on a various, energetic contributor base. By leveraging the CNCF’s impartial governance framework, Higress can entice builders, customers, and enterprise contributors from throughout the globe, free from single-vendor affect. This open mannequin will speed up innovation and make sure the challenge stays agile in assembly world vast consumer wants.
- Standardizing AI infrastructure: As AI purposes explode in reputation, the market desperately wants infrastructure explicitly optimized for AI workloads. With its superior capabilities in unified multi-model administration and AI Agent integration, Higress is well-positioned to drive the institution of common AI gateway requirements throughout the CNCF platform.
Roadmap: Lengthy-term compatibility and ecosystem evolution
Trying forward, the challenge will focus its growth on two main tracks:
- Lengthy-term Ingress compatibility, full Gateway API and Inference Extension help, and complete Nginx Ingress migration options:
- Keep deep compatibility with normal Ingress and Nginx Ingress annotations whereas supporting a dual-stack coexistence with the Gateway API.
- Strengthen the supply of Gateway API and Inference Extension capabilities, offering sustainable open-source infrastructure for cloud-native networking and AI purposes.
- Ship complete Nginx Ingress migration paths, making certain customers expertise a clean transition whether or not they undertake the Gateway API or persist with conventional Ingress.
- Steady AI functionality enlargement:
- Deepen help for Mannequin Context Protocol (MCP) to make Higress the usual entry level for AI brokers and LLM site visitors;
- Introduce “Higress Agent” for autonomous, clever site visitors governance.
- Improve help for real-time communication protocols essential to AI streaming situations.
- Construct strong safety administration and progressive disclosure frameworks for AI abilities.
- Proceed advancing core AI-native site visitors options, together with token-based price limiting, multi-model fallback, and clever load balancing.
Sandbox is only the start
Becoming a member of the CNCF Sandbox is a place to begin, not a end line. The Higress group stays deeply dedicated to steady funding in clear governance, high-quality documentation, and international group development.
We thank the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee, the broader cloud-native group, and each contributor and adopter who has supported Higress. We stay up for constructing a safer, scalable, and AI-friendly infrastructure alongside the CNCF ecosystem.
Study extra: higress.ai |GitHub |Documentation
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