> For the complete documentation index, see [llms.txt](https://docs.digitalapi.ai/llms.txt). Markdown versions of documentation pages are available by appending `.md` to page URLs; this page is available as [Markdown](https://docs.digitalapi.ai/api-gateway/overview.md). # Overview This page is the what behind AILIX: what the product is, who runs it, the capabilities it gives you, and how it is deployed. For the step-by-step tasks, follow the chapters from [Getting started](/api-gateway/getting-started.md) onward. ## What AILIX is AILIX is an enterprise API gateway and developer platform. The data plane sits in front of your backend services and enforces routing, authentication, rate-limiting, transformation, and observability policy. You work with it through two surfaces: the **Helix Portal**, the control plane where you define and deploy configuration, and an embedded **Marketplace** that acts as the **developer portal** for your external consumers. AILIX ships with the Marketplace built in, so no separate deployment is required. In the developer portal, external consumers discover your APIs, request subscriptions, and manage the applications and credentials they use to call them. {% hint style="info" %} **Who this guide is for.** You are the engineer who runs the API gateway: you operate production traffic, manage backend pools, configure routing and traffic policy, attach plugins, issue and rotate credentials for external consumers, and read the dashboards during a release. This guide covers the mechanics of doing that work in AILIX; it does not re-explain gateway concepts you already know. {% endhint %} ## What AILIX gives you * **Versioned services with deployable revisions.** Every change increments a revision; revisions deploy to environments and roll back without downtime. * **Upstreams with active health checks and configurable load balancing.** A five-stage wizard binds an upstream to an environment and walks through targets, traffic policy, TLS, and health-check thresholds. * **A 105-plugin catalogue** covering authentication, traffic control, transformation, AI, security, and observability. Plugins attach at global, service, route, or consumer scope, run in a documented execution order, and ship with a config schema you fill in from the portal. * **Multi-environment topology.** Per-environment hostnames and per-environment metrics; promote services and rotate credentials between environments. * **Custom widgets and request traces.** Build named widgets for the metrics you watch every day; drill from a widget data point into the end-to-end timing of a single request via the trace timeline. * **Developer Portal with products, apps, and quotas.** API Products are subscribable bundles with optional quotas; apps carry client-ID and client-secret credentials that AILIX validates at the gateway. * **RBAC with fine-grained permissions and SAML SSO.** Roles bundle resource-level permissions across more than a hundred verbs; groups bundle users; SAML configuration supports multiple identity providers with attribute mappings for JIT provisioning. ## Architecture AILIX separates a control plane from a data plane. In the **control plane**, you define configuration in the Helix Portal (or through the Admin API); that configuration is held in a configuration store as a set of objects: Services, Routes, Upstreams, Consumers, Plugins, and Environments. The configuration is distributed to the **data plane**, the runtime that processes traffic. The gateway is organised in layers. Plugin capabilities (observability, security, traffic management, and your own extensions) run on the plugin runtime, which runs on the core (route matching, load balancing, service discovery, configuration management, and the Admin API), all on a high-performance request-processing foundation. Clients reach the gateway, and the gateway proxies each request to your backend services. AILIX also ships with an embedded **Marketplace** that serves as the **developer portal** for external consumers. Consumers discover APIs and request subscriptions in the developer portal; once approved, their applications call the gateway directly with the issued credentials. The developer portal is a management surface and is not in the request path. ![Figure 1. AILIX software architecture: capability plugins on the plugin runtime, on the core, on a high-performance runtime foundation. Plugins can be written in several languages.](/files/2okAGOzcMu8RB9SiQIUU) ### Request lifecycle For each incoming request, the data plane resolves the route and consumer from the configuration store, selects the plugins that match the route, filters them, and runs them in order. It then resolves a dynamic upstream and load-balances the request to a target in the upstream pool, using round-robin or consistent-hash selection. ![Figure 2. AILIX request lifecycle: the gateway matches a route, filters and runs the plugin chain, then resolves a dynamic upstream and load-balances to a target pool by round-robin or consistent hash.](/files/uCQwWh9XEgtmYmourgKO) ## The four working areas The Helix Portal groups every operator surface into four working areas. Each maps to a section of this guide.
API GatewayServices, upstreams, routes, plugins, and environments. The core traffic-management surface./pages/f4WCBpW0BxOTjD8L7D1A
ObservabilityCustom widgets, request traces, and custom reports for live traffic./pages/ManEBvZUdPv8GfDDQWzu
Developer PortalThe consumer experience and API distribution, documented as a separate product.https://docs.digitalapi.ai/developer-portal
SetupOrganisation, users, groups, roles, and identity-provider connections./pages/S1eoedB5gFl4b4pjVWh0
## Deployment models AILIX runs as SaaS, in your private cloud, or fully on-premises. The portal experience is identical across all three; the difference is which networks the gateway can reach. Installation and deployment topology are covered in the separate AILIX Operations Guide. --- # Agent Instructions This documentation is published with GitBook. GitBook is the documentation platform designed so that both humans and AI agents can read, navigate, and reason over technical content effectively. Learn more at gitbook.com. ## Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter, and the optional `goal` query parameter: ``` GET https://docs.digitalapi.ai/api-gateway/overview.md?ask=&goal= ``` `ask` is the immediate question: it should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. `goal` is optional and describes the broader end goal you are ultimately trying to accomplish on behalf of the user. GitBook uses it to tailor the answer towards what is most useful for that goal. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.