Introduction

Relay is a developer-first API gateway and management platform. It sits between your clients and your backend services, providing instant routing, rate limiting, authentication, and observability without any complex configuration.

Why Relay?

Building APIs is easy, but managing them in production is hard. Relay handles the operational heavy lifting so you can focus on building features. By routing your traffic through Relay, you instantly gain:

• Automatic observability: Every request is logged, timed, and analyzed.
• Zero-config rate limiting: Protect your upstream services from abuse instantly.
• API key management: Issue and revoke keys without writing any auth code.

How it works

When you create an API in Relay, you are given a unique Gateway URL (or you can attach a custom domain). You configure a target backend URL, and Relay transparently proxies traffic to that backend while executing middleware (auth, rate limits, logging) at the edge.

Next steps

Ready to get started? Check out the guides below to deploy your first API behind Relay in under five minutes.