# aklivity/zilla

🦎 A lightweight, multi-protocol gateway for event-driven applications and AI agents. Expose and govern Kafka, MQTT, APIs, and MCP through one high-performance engine with shared routing, security, schema, and observability.

Repository: https://github.com/aklivity/zilla
Canonical: https://ross.abutalabs.com/products/zilla
Homepage: https://docs.aklivity.io/latest
Language: Java
License: NOASSERTION
License Family: other
Topics: kafka, rest, server-sent-events, streaming-api, grpc, mqtt, event-driven-architecture, proxy, event-stream-proxy, event-streaming, api-gateway, iot, kafka-proxy, asyncapi, openapi
Last push: 2026-08-26T19:13:51+00:00

## Health v2 (maintenance only)
Score: 99/100 (v2, computed 2026-09-03T02:20:16.233290+00:00)
- activity 99, release rhythm 98, longevity 100
- inputs: {"age_days": 1730, "days_push": 7, "days_rel": 15, "gap_med": 5, "n_releases_24m": 38}
- flags: no_license
- formula: round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10)

## Adoption (not part of the score)
Stars 1717, forks 146 (observed 2026-08-28T04:05:26.444874+00:00)

## What it is
Zilla is a stateless, multi-protocol gateway for event-driven applications and AI agents, exposing Kafka and MQTT over HTTP, SSE, gRPC, MQTT, and WebSocket, and providing a governed MCP endpoint for AI agents. It is configured declaratively via a single zilla.yaml with shared routing, identity, authorization, schema validation, and telemetry.

## Use cases
- expose kafka topics as rest apis
- bridge mqtt iot devices to kafka
- give ai agents a single governed mcp endpoint
- proxy grpc and server-sent-events to event streams
- secure kafka access with jwt auth and tls
- generate api gateway config from asyncapi or openapi specs
- route llm api traffic through one policy-enforced endpoint

## When to choose
- you need non-kafka clients (browsers, iot devices) to consume or produce kafka events
- you want one gateway for both event streaming and AI agent/MCP traffic
- you prefer declarative, spec-driven (AsyncAPI/OpenAPI) gateway configuration
- you need protocol translation without writing custom bridges or middleware

## When to avoid
- you need a simple reverse proxy for plain HTTP services only
- your stack is not JVM/Kafka-centric and you don't need protocol translation
- you require a managed SaaS gateway rather than self-hosted infrastructure

## Facets
- artifact type: service
- maturity: active
- function: api-gateway, proxy, routing, middleware, auth, authorization, websocket, rpc, streaming, monitoring, mcp, llm-inference
- domain: apis, iot, artificial-intelligence, microservices, backend, web-development, developer-tools, security
- platform: jvm, self-hosted, cross-platform, cloud
- tags: kafka, mqtt, grpc, server-sent-events, asyncapi, openapi, event-driven-architecture, mcp-gateway, event-gateway, protocol-translation, declarative-config, messaging, ai-agents, docker, kubernetes

## Member repositories
- aklivity/zilla (main) score 99

## Provenance
- Observed fields: from GitHub, fetched 2026-08-28T04:05:26.444874+00:00.
- Health v2: computed from the inputs above; adoption is never an input.
- Inferred fields (summary, facets, guidance): AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, on 2026-08-30T03:34:12.376811+00:00, confidence not recorded.
  - readme: https://github.com/aklivity/zilla (fetched 2026-08-28T04:05:26.444874+00:00, sha 1b1e36fb9e38)
  - homepage: https://docs.aklivity.io/latest (fetched 2026-08-29T11:10:10.832982+00:00, sha 42610a7ec4d2)
  - site_page: https://docs.aklivity.io/latest/releases (fetched 2026-08-29T11:10:10.842965+00:00, sha 938447ca2edd)
- Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00.