Easegress is a Go-based traffic orchestration system from MegaEase that functions as an API gateway, reverse proxy, and service mesh data plane. It speaks HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2, HTTP/3 (QUIC), and MQTT, and can sit in front of services to handle routing, load balancing, rate limiting, circuit breaking, and canary/traffic-splitting.
Architecturally, Easegress runs as a cluster of nodes that use an embedded Raft implementation for leader election and configuration replication — there is no external etcd dependency, which makes it one of the simpler gateways to operate standalone. Traffic flows through user-defined Pipelines composed of Filters (proxy, validator, request builder, wasm, etc.), so you build behavior by composing small filters rather than writing Envoy-style xDS config. It supports WebAssembly filters for custom logic and has an OpenTelemetry integration for tracing.
It competes most directly with Envoy, Kong, and Traefik. The pitch versus Envoy is operational simplicity (one Go binary, built-in clustering), and more recently it has picked up AI gateway features — proxying and observing calls to OpenAI, Anthropic, and similar providers. Easegress entered the CNCF Sandbox in December 2023.