“Apache APISIX supports multiple protocols, saving great R&D costs and endowing our platform with endless vitality.”
Weifeng Sheng
,
Architect of Hyperchain Platform
in supporting heterogeneous chains
Founded in 2016, HyperChain Technology, a leading blockchain services provider, offers the world's first full-stack blockchain 3.0 system. It has served more than 300 enterprises and landed 200+ typical applications in key areas such as smart city, financial technology, energy transformation, enterprise digitization, meta-universe, etc.
During its rapid growth, Hyperchain experienced significant challenges in establishing its blockchain platform.
Hyperchain has solved its challenges by registering service information with etcd and APISIX, which is the unified entry point for internal microservices.
This approach provided standardized traffic management, improved security and authentication management, convenient permission control, reduced costs, increased stability, and unified management of multiple protocols.
APISIX's proxy-rewrite plugin can conveniently handle cases where prefixes are added to the API path of the same service to expose APIs under the same domain name. The API gateway can strip these prefixes and forward the request to the backend service.
Another significant advantage for customers is APISIX's traffic limit management capabilities. The limit-req plugin can effectively restrict traffic input and output to ensure the platform's stability, which is especially important when dealing with large numbers of calls to driving components.
Hyperchain has developed a plugin for private deployment scenarios to collaborate with APISIX. This plugin enables Party A to use its own authentication services or service account system. When front-end traffic visits the website, it must first pass through the Access-auth plugin to gain access to the backend BFF (Backend for Frontend) after authentication.
Another significant advantage for customers is APISIX's hot reloading feature, which saves development time and allows users to modify parts of their code without restarting the entire plugin runner.
Hyperchain's blockchain platform involves multiple blockchains with complex RBAC permission controls and requires various certificates on the client side. APISIX's key-auth plugin simplifies the process by unifying the underlying chain, allowing authorized users to access the blockchain without worrying about permission configuration.
The high concurrency of bank users visiting nodes on the Hyperchain blockchain platform can create a vulnerability for single nodes to be impacted by traffic. To address this issue, Hyperchain deployed Apache APISIX, which utilizes etcd for dynamic scalability, on K8s with the Horizontal Pod Autoscaler. This approach ensures the stability of nodes by mitigating the problem of single-point traffic impact.
APISIX's support for multiple protocols allows it to adapt flexibly to the underlying layers of different blockchains, reducing development costs associated with platform integration.
As of May 2021, the Tencent OTeam using Apache APISIX has already deployed it for more than 10 teams within Tencent, with the largest project handling over 1 billion daily requests.
After adopting APISIX Ingress Controller, it is easier for developers to add configurations on the gateway than to write codes.
Airwallex has made a smooth transition to multi-cloud and microservices architectures thanks to API7 commercial support: a highly optimized and scalable platform and the support of the developer community!