MCP100 verdict
Not currently recommended. Strong type-specific gateway design with per-caller tool grants, but production gateway control-plane risk still warrants Shortlist.
MCP100 Assessment
Editorial verdict
Reviewed September 11, 2026
Task Fit
Mapped
Cloud operations
Trust
Status warning
mcp_relevance; task_fit; documentation; maintenance_source_health; install_supply_chain; advisory_freshness; adoption_evidence_presence; resource_type_requirements
Maintenance
Date unavailable
No dated repository or package update is currently stored.
Popularity
Signals unavailable
No independently comparable adoption metric is currently stored.
Evidence scope
No MCP-specific repository metric is stored
No MCP-specific package metric is stored
Repository identity: api7/aisix
Stars observation date unavailable · Downloads observation date unavailable
Exact implementation repository metric.
No exact package is documented.
Publisher activity observed September 11, 2026
Current source snapshot
Source relationship: First-party MCP
Reviewed September 11, 2026
Evidence-backed setup
This profile has type-appropriate, source-backed setup rather than an MCP-server client connector configuration.
Type-appropriate, source-backed setup for this gateway profile.
Capability
Strong type-specific gateway design with per-caller tool grants, but production gateway control-plane risk still warrants Watchlist.
Expose registered servers at an aggregated /mcp endpoint or per-server endpoint.
Control which tools a caller can list and invoke using API-key principals and grants.
Keep caller credentials separate from gateway-held upstream credentials.
Apply gateway policy, rate limits, and usage attribution around tool calls.
AISIX is an MCP gateway; the exposed catalog is the aggregate of registered upstream MCP servers.
Not measured yet
Estimated token footprint of the MCP tool schemas exposed to the agent.
Reviewed access
Review the exact access boundary before connecting this MCP to accounts, credentials, or sensitive data.
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reviewed-detail:aisix-mcp-gateway is listed as First-party MCP in MCP100’s current evidence.
Current official resources:
Original product, capability, tool, and usage documentation from the MCP publisher. Installation sections appear under Install & Agents.
One OpenAI-compatible API in front of every model. Route, govern, secure, cache, and observe all your LLM and AI-agent traffic from a single control point — shipped as one static binary with low per-request overhead. Run it in your infrastructure for free, forever.
Built by the original creators of Apache APISIX.
Start free · Documentation · Quickstart · AISIX Enterprise and AISIX Cloud · Roadmap
AISIX OSS is the open-source product built around the Rust-native AISIX gateway. The gateway puts a single, OpenAI-compatible API in front of every LLM provider — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, AWS Bedrock, Azure OpenAI, DeepSeek, and any OpenAI-compatible endpoint. It gives platform teams one place to route, govern, secure, and observe LLM traffic, with first-class SSE streaming and low gateway overhead.
It runs as a single static binary — low cold-start, lock-free config reads, and hot
configuration reloads with no restarts: declare resources in one resources.yaml and
reload on SIGHUP, or point the gateway at etcd for a multi-replica cluster. Run the
gateway in your infrastructure, or connect it to AISIX Enterprise or
AISIX Cloud
for centralized management with team governance, budgets, audit, and a dashboard.
AISIX OSS (this repo) is the open-source product. It runs without a control plane using declarative configuration or etcd. The same gateway binary serves as the data plane in the commercial products: customers host the control plane with AISIX Enterprise, while API7 hosts it with AISIX Cloud. In all three products, the gateway runs in your environment and calls providers directly; live AI traffic does not pass through either control plane. The proxy API is identical throughout. Talk to us about AISIX Enterprise or AISIX Cloud →
base_url and switch models without changing code.Covered by 183 end-to-end scenario files (496 cases) that run against real gateway processes.
:3000) — chat/completions, completions, responses,
embeddings, rerank, images/{generations,edits}, audio/{speech,transcriptions,translations},
videos (submit → poll → fetch), files, batches, fine_tuning/jobs, realtime,
GET /v1/models, plus a root-level /passthrough/:provider/* escape hatch. Native SSE streaming,
tool/function calling, JSON mode, vision/multimodal input, and reasoning-content support.POST /v1/messages as a first-class route, working against
any configured upstream: requests and responses (including streaming) are translated
both ways when a model points at a non-Anthropic provider.round_robin
(smooth weighted round-robin), consistent_hash (session affinity keyed by header /
cookie / API key / client IP), failover, plus metric-based least_cost,
least_latency, and least_busy. Per-target priority tiers (active/backup pools),
retry budgets, cooldowns, tag-conditional targets, and per-attempt timeouts.api_key / model / team /
member / team_member). Counters are per-process by default, or shared across replicas
with the Redis backend.422 content_filter;
monitor mode records what would have happened without blocking./mcp with gateway-held
credentials, per-server tool namespaces, and per-caller access. It serves every
Streamable HTTP revision from 2025-03-26 through stateless 2026-07-28 without
downstream sessions. Upstreams use initialize by default or server/discover with
protocol_version: "2026-07-28". CI runs the official MCP suite's applicable tools-only
protocol scenarios. Also exposes a REST API as MCP tools from its OpenAPI description./a2a/:agent, serving each
agent's card with URLs rewritten to the gateway, over JSON-RPC 2.0./metrics, structured per-request access logs, usage
events, OTLP/GenAI span export (Langfuse, Honeycomb, Grafana Cloud, or any OTLP receiver),
plus dedicated Datadog and Aliyun SLS log exporters and object-storage (S3/GCS/Azure Blob)
telemetry.resources.yaml carries all ten resource collections
(provider keys, models, caller keys, guardrails, MCP servers, A2A agents, cache policies,
observability exporters, rate-limit policies, OIDC providers), validated against the same
JSON Schemas the gateway uses at runtime. aisix validate checks a file offline; SIGHUP
reloads it atomically./livez and /readyz on the proxy listener; /status/config,
/status/ready, /status/models, and Prometheus /metrics on a dedicated metrics
listener (:9090). The admin listener (:3001) additionally serves a read-only
resource surface, OpenAPI 3 with a Scalar UI, and a playground. Resources are managed
declaratively — through the resources_file (reloaded on SIGHUP) or direct etcd
writes — not through the admin listener; its former write endpoints were removed.AISIX dispatches through five native adapter families — distinct wire-protocol bridges, not one generic relabel. Whatever the upstream protocol, the client-facing API stays OpenAI-shaped.
| Adapter family | Reaches | Wire shape · auth |
|---|---|---|
openai | OpenAI + any OpenAI-compatible vendor — DeepSeek, Groq, Mistral, Together, Fireworks, Perplexity, vLLM, Ollama, or self-hosted OpenAI-compatible endpoints | OpenAI chat completions · Bearer |
anthropic | Anthropic Claude | Anthropic Messages · x-api-key |
bedrock | AWS Bedrock — Anthropic, Meta Llama, Mistral, Cohere, Amazon Titan/Nova, AI21 | Bedrock Converse + /invoke · SigV4 |
vertex | Google Vertex AI (Gemini) | Vertex :generateContent · OAuth2 |
azure-openai | Azure OpenAI | Azure deployments · api-key / Entra ID |
Plus specialized handling for vendor quirks (e.g. DeepSeek reasoning content) and dedicated rerank / embeddings vendors (Cohere, Jina). Details in adapter protocol families.
Same gateway binary, same proxy API — in every form the gateway runs in your environment. AISIX Enterprise adds a customer-hosted commercial control plane. AISIX Cloud adds an API7-hosted commercial control plane.
| AISIX OSS (this repo) | AISIX Enterprise | AISIX Cloud | |
|---|---|---|---|
| License | Apache-2.0 | Commercial | Commercial |
| Control plane | None | Customer-hosted | API7-hosted |
| Configuration | Declarative resources.yaml, or etcd for a cluster | Dashboard + AISIX Cloud Admin API | Dashboard + AISIX Cloud Admin API |
| Tenancy | Single instance / namespace | Organization-scoped environments, teams, and members | Organization-scoped environments, teams, and members |
| Provider keys | ${VAR} references in resources.yaml; plaintext credentials in etcd | Encrypted at rest; operator-triggered in-place rotation | Encrypted at rest; operator-triggered in-place rotation |
| Budgets | — (rate and token limits only) | Per key, provider, environment, organization, and team | Per key, provider, environment, organization, and team |
| RBAC and audit | Local admin key; no organization layer | Organization roles, invitations, and audit history | Organization roles, invitations, and audit history |
| Operations | You operate the gateway | You operate the control plane and gateways | API7 operates the control plane; you operate gateways |
→ Want centralized governance, budgets, and a dashboard? Talk to API7 about AISIX Enterprise or AISIX Cloud, or book a demo.
A single Cargo workspace; the aisix-server crate builds one binary named aisix that
wires the crates together.
crates/
├── aisix-core Config, snapshot, resource model, resources.yaml source, errors
├── aisix-etcd Config provider + watch supervisor
├── aisix-gateway Hub & bridge, SSE parser, provider trait
├── aisix-proxy /v1/*, /mcp, /a2a handlers, routing, middleware
├── aisix-admin Read-only resource surface + playground + OpenAPI
├── aisix-provider-* openai · anthropic · azure-openai · bedrock · vertex
├── aisix-mcp MCP gateway — server registry, tool ACL, transports
├── aisix-a2a A2A agent gateway — agent cards, JSON-RPC bridge
├── aisix-ratelimit fixed-window + token accounting + concurrency (local | redis)
├── aisix-cache memory + redis backends
├── aisix-redis shared Redis connection for cache + rate limits
├── aisix-guardrails pre/post content-policy hooks
├── aisix-obs tracing, metrics, access log, exporters
└── aisix-server the `aisix` binary — bootstrap + CLI
Highlights on the roadmap; tracked live in issues:
Shipped since this list was last written: the MCP gateway, the A2A agent gateway, OIDC/JWT inbound auth, Redis-backed distributed rate limiting, and the Lakera, Presidio, PII, and OpenAI Moderation guardrails — see Features above.
Prerequisites: the Rust toolchain pinned in rust-toolchain.toml. Docker is only needed
for the tests that exercise etcd, Redis, or provider emulators.
cargo check --workspace
cargo fmt --check
cargo clippy --workspace -- -D warnings
cargo test --workspace
# Coverage (matches the CI gate)
cargo llvm-cov --workspace --lcov --output-path lcov.info
# Run locally against a resources.yaml (no etcd needed). Copy the Quickstart's two files
# and change resources_file to the local path, e.g. resources_file: ./resources.yaml
cargo run -p aisix-server --bin aisix -- --config config.local.yaml
# Check a resources file without starting a listener
cargo run -p aisix-server --bin aisix -- validate --resources resources.yaml
If AISIX is useful to you, a ⭐ helps other engineers find it.