The Crate Open Beta is Here
For a long time, the API gateway market has felt polarized. On one end, you have the massive, enterprise-grade solutions that require a PhD in configuration management to set up. On the other, you have simple proxies that lack the power to handle complex, real-world data transformations.
We built Crate to fill the void in the middle.
Today, we are thrilled to announce that Crate is officially in Open Beta.
Why We Built Crate
We believe that infrastructure should be invisible. It should work so well that you forget it’s there. But too often, developers find themselves fighting with their gateway—debugging obscure configuration files, dealing with vendor-specific limitations, or paying a “latency tax” for features they don’t even use.
We wanted to build a gateway that was:
- Truly Cloud Agnostic: Your gateway shouldn’t force you into a specific cloud vendor’s ecosystem.
- Developer-First: Configuration should be intuitive, not a puzzle.
- High-Performance: Speed isn’t a feature; it’s a requirement.
Under the Hood: Go + Redis
To achieve the performance metrics we demanded, we made the decision early on to engineer Crate using Go and Redis.
Go gives us the raw concurrency and low-level control needed to handle thousands of requests per second with minimal overhead. Redis provides the lightning-fast state management required for rate limiting, caching, and session handling without slowing down the request pipeline.
The result is a gateway that feels snappy, predictable, and incredibly stable.
Key Features in Open Beta
1. The Plugin System
No two architectures are the same. We designed Crate with a modular Plugin System that allows you to extend functionality without forking the core. Whether you need custom authentication flows, specialized logging, or unique traffic shaping, Crate adapts to your architecture, not the other way around.
2. JSONata Transformations
Data rarely arrives in the exact format your services need. Crate includes native support for JSONata, a lightweight query and transformation language for JSON data. This allows you to reshape payloads on the fly—renaming fields, aggregating data, or filtering responses—right at the edge, before the request ever hits your microservices.
3. Cloud-Agnostic Routing
Crate treats every destination equally. Whether your services are running on AWS Lambda, a DigitalOcean droplet, or a bare-metal server in your basement, Crate routes traffic seamlessly between them. This empowers you to build multi-cloud or hybrid-cloud strategies without the headache of disparate networking rules.
What’s Next?
This Open Beta is just the beginning. With our core infrastructure locked in and operational, our focus is turning toward expanding our documentation, scaling the platform, and releasing deep-dive guides on migrating from legacy gateways.
But right now, we want you to push it to its limits.
We are inviting developers, architects, and tinkerers to sign up, deploy a gateway, and tell us what you think. Your feedback in this phase will directly shape the final polish for our General Availability launch.