Introduction

Altair is an open source API gateway written in Go. Designed to be distributed, lightweight, simple, fast, reliable, cross platform, programming language agnostic and robust - by default

What is API Gateway?#

An API gateway is an API management tool that sits between a client and a collection of backend services.

An API gateway acts as a reverse proxy to accept all application programming interface (API) calls, aggregate the various services required to fulfill them, and return the appropriate result.

Most enterprise APIs are deployed via API gateways. It’s common for API gateways to handle common tasks that are used across a system of API services, such as user authentication, rate limiting, and statistics.

Why Altair#

There are various API Gateways available to you when you want to distribute your service or split it into microservices. However we believe Altair is the best choice for building your API Gateway because of its simplicity.

Distributed#

Altair is designed to be distributed, but it can also be a monolithic reverse proxy. What we mean by distributed is that all plugins can be modified according to your choice, you can choose the OAuth plugin and the interface will be mysql, postgre, redis, or an external service in the future. Or have a cache mechanism with memcache or redis. All of them are free and can be configured easily.

Simple and Fast#

Altair is designed to have as many plugins as possible, we aim to support all the tools available for API Gateway for free and can be used interchangeably and sequentially. Even when you want to build an application you don’t have to think about or create a flow of authentication and auhorization. Since altair already supports it, simply migrate with the command line and it’s ready to go.

Altair is the right choice when you need to build an API service with oauth flow, because we already have it and it will speed up your development.

Programming Language Agnostic#

You don’t really have to master any new programming language to understand altair, except yaml. We designed the Altair to be as simple as possible so that anyone can jump right into the configuration and make changes easily without even understanding Go. It can be paired from any service with any programming language.

Cross Platform#

Altair can run on popular platforms such as Linux, Windows, and Mac. Thanks to Go for being cross-platform.