Altair

Overview

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, for maximum efficiency, reliability and adaptability!

Architecture Overview

Key Features

• High Performance: Built with Go for maximum speed and concurrency
• Lightweight & Simple: Minimal dependencies and easy to deploy
• Distributed Architecture: Supports horizontal scaling and high availability
• Cross-Platform: Runs on any major operating system
• Extensible: Plugin system for custom middleware and integrations

Tech Stack

1. Go for core development
2. Docker for containerization and deployment

My Role

As the portfolio owner, I designed Altair from the ground up and continue to maintain it as an open-source project. My responsibilities included:

• Architecture Design: Conceptualized and designed the entire system architecture
• Core Development: Built the fundamental gateway logic and request routing
• Plugin System: Implemented the extensible plugin and middleware architecture
• Documentation: Created comprehensive documentation and onboarding guides
• Community Management: Maintained the repository and managed open-source contributions

Implementation Highlights

The gateway leverages Go's concurrency primitives to handle thousands of concurrent requests efficiently. The core architecture includes:

• Request Routing: Intelligent routing based on path, method, and headers
• Middleware Pipeline: Pluggable middleware for authentication, logging, and rate limiting
• Load Balancing: Built-in load balancing across multiple upstream services
• Health Checks: Automatic health monitoring and failover mechanisms

Challenges & Solutions

• Concurrency Management: Used Go's goroutines and channels for efficient request handling
• Plugin Architecture: Designed a flexible system allowing custom middleware development
• Performance Optimization: Implemented connection pooling and request caching
• Configuration Management: Created a YAML-based configuration system for easy deployment

Impact

Despite not having production deployments yet, Altair has gained 50 GitHub stars, demonstrating community interest in its clean architecture and approachable design. The project serves as a reference implementation for building high-performance API gateways in Go.