Unifying the Gates: Building Flipkart’s Centralized API Gateway for 10x Scale

Flipkart built Nexus, a centralized API gateway using open-source APISIX, to replace their fragmented infrastructure where each team managed separate gateway functions. The solution consolidates authentication, rate-limiting, and session management into a unified platform achieving 99.99% availability with sub-10ms p99 latency overhead. The three-plane architecture (management, control, and data planes) uses etcd for real-time configuration updates and deploys across multiple data centers for high availability. The MART organization serves as a case study, showing how Nexus eliminated redundant systems and standardized API management across diverse channels.