🚀 Mycelium: The Ultimate API Gateway

Mycelium is an open and free API Gateway, designed to operate in modern, multi-tenant, and API-oriented environments. The project prioritizes architectural clarity, security, and extensibility, maintaining an explicit separation between technical concerns and organizational aspects of the project.

This repository documents the fundamentals of Mycelium, with special focus on its authorization model, which combines declarative controls at the gateway with contextual decisions close to the resource.

Overview

Mycelium acts as the entry layer for downstream services, being responsible for authentication, identity normalization, routing, and security policy enforcement. The gateway does not impose business logic, but provides authorization primitives that allow each service to evaluate permissions in an explicit, secure, and contextual manner.

The project is maintained as open source software, with its continuity based on governance, community collaboration, and ecosystem funding and acceleration initiatives — aspects that are independent of internal technical decisions.

Key Features

• Modern and extensible API Gateway
• Native support for multi-tenant environments
• Authorization at multiple layers (gateway and downstream)
• Identity context injection via Profile
• Composable authorization primitives
• Architecture compatible with market standards

Authorization Model

Mycelium's authorization model is one of its central pillars and is documented in detail in the file:

👉 Authorization

In summary:

• The gateway applies declarative controls per route (coarse-grained)
• Downstream services apply contextual authorizations (fine-grained)
• The Profile acts as an active capability object, not just as an identity payload

Conceptual Structure

Client
  ↓
API Gateway (auth, routing, edge RBAC)
  ↓
Downstream Services (contextual FBAC)

This separation ensures low coupling, high expressiveness, and security decisions close to the resource.

Project Governance and Sustainability

Mycelium is an open and free project. Its maintenance and evolution are handled within the project's organizational scope, through:

• Community collaboration
• Institutional support
• Funding and acceleration initiatives

These aspects do not influence or condition the technical authorization model, which remains neutral, explicit, and verifiable.

Project Status

Mycelium is under active development and open to contributions. Architectural discussions, improvement proposals, and conceptual reviews are welcome.

License

See the LICENSE file for details about the project's licensing.