In today's complex microservices architecture, managing service-to-service communication has become increasingly challenging. FastProxy emerges as a compelling solution, offering a production-grade, high-performance service proxy designed specifically for securing and accelerating east-west traffic in modern distributed systems.

The Need for FastProxy​

Modern distributed systems face several critical challenges:

• Service-to-service security: Establishing trust boundaries between services
• Performance overhead: Managing encryption and authentication without impacting latency
• Traffic management: Controlling and routing requests efficiently
• Observability: Gaining insights into service interactions

FastProxy addresses these challenges by combining wire-speed cryptography, signature verification, traffic governance, and observability into a single Go-native runtime that is easy to embed, automate, and operate.

Core Capabilities​

Secure Transport​

FastProxy provides symmetric and asymmetric encryption for inbound and outbound traffic with transparent key orchestration. This ensures that all communication between services remains secure without requiring complex configuration.

Traffic Integrity​

Through signature verification, request tracing, and tamper detection across every hop, FastProxy ensures that data remains unmodified and authentic throughout its journey across services.

Adaptive Flow Control​

The platform includes per-endpoint throttling, circuit breaking, and concurrency guards to protect downstream services from being overwhelmed by traffic spikes.

Payload Optimization​

Built-in compression/decompression features reduce network footprint without sacrificing fidelity, making communications more efficient.

Architecture Overview​

FastProxy is composed of modular components that can be combined to match your specific topology:

• Center: Orchestrates service metadata, configuration, and dynamic rulesets
• InProxy / OutProxy: Handle ingress and egress enforcement, terminating secure channels and applying policy
• Server: Hosts upstream business logic or routes to existing services
• Client SDK: Offers first-class APIs for integrating FastProxy directly into Go applications

The control/data plane split enables teams to evolve policies in real time without redeploying workloads.

Getting Started with FastProxy​

FastProxy is designed to be easily integrated into existing Go projects:

go get github.com/Kingson4Wu/fast_proxy

You can embed FastProxy directly in your applications:

package main

import (
    "github.com/Kingson4Wu/fast_proxy/inproxy"
    "github.com/Kingson4Wu/fast_proxy/inproxy/inconfig"
)

func main() {
    config := inconfig.Config{
        Port:   8080,
        Target: "http://localhost:9000",
        // Additional security and routing configurations
    }
    
    inproxy.NewServer(config)
}

Ecosystem Friendly​

FastProxy provides first-class support for protobuf payloads and FastHTTP, enabling extreme throughput on commodity hardware. The system also includes hooks for custom codecs, authentication backends, and policy engines, making it adaptable to various organizational needs.

Operational Excellence​

The platform features native metrics, structured logging (using Uber's Zap), and deep observability integrations for production monitoring. This includes support for Prometheus metrics, request tracing, and comprehensive logging solutions.

Performance & Hardening​

FastProxy is optimized around FastHTTP with zero-copy buffers to minimize GC pressure. It has proven support for high concurrency workloads and has been validated through comprehensive unit and integration testing to guard against regressions.

Roadmap & Community​

FastProxy is actively maintained and continues to evolve alongside modern distributed systems requirements. Upcoming focus areas include:

• Advanced policy authoring UX and multi-cluster federation
• Extended telemetry coverage with OpenTelemetry exporters
• Managed key lifecycle integrations with cloud KMS providers

Conclusion​

FastProxy represents a comprehensive approach to service proxy functionality, addressing the critical needs of modern distributed systems while maintaining performance and security at the forefront. Whether embedded within applications, deployed as a sidecar, or operated as a central gateway, FastProxy provides the flexibility and capabilities needed for enterprise-grade microservices communication.

We welcome contributions and feedback from the community. If you're working with distributed systems and need a secure, performant proxy solution, consider giving FastProxy a try and joining our growing community.

You can find more information in the GitHub repository and project documentation.