Higress is an Apache-2.0 cloud-native API gateway on Envoy and Istio adding AI-gateway features — LLM routing, token rate-limiting, Wasm plugins.
Yes, Higress is open source under the Apache-2.0 license.
Higress is free to use.
Yes, Higress can be self-hosted (the source is available under the Apache-2.0 license).
Higress is a cloud-native API gateway built on Envoy and Istio, developed by Alibaba. Beyond standard microservice routing and Kubernetes ingress control, it ships AI-gateway capabilities — routing across LLM providers, token-based rate limiting, and model fallback — so a single gateway can front both internal services and model traffic. It is written in Go and extensible through Wasm plugins.
It suits teams that already run Envoy/Istio and want one gateway to govern API traffic and AI-model calls together, rather than bolting a separate LLM proxy alongside their service mesh. Apache-2.0 and self-hostable.