Ikanos is the open source capability engine for Spec-Driven Integration.
It reads one YAML file describing a slice of your business — say customers or orders. A capability consumes the HTTP/REST APIs you already have and structures their responses into clean JSON, then aggregates and orchestrates those operations into a unified contract that it instantly serves to AI agents, web apps, and partners over several protocols at once. One source of truth, many audiences, no code to write or compile.
- 🤖 You're building AI agents — give agents governed MCP tools without writing handlers, and send the model exactly the context a task needs. → Context engineering tutorial
- 🔌 You own a sprawl of APIs, microservices, or a monolith — put a clean, governed contract in front of messy or legacy endpoints. → API reusability tutorial
- 🧱 You want one source of truth for every client — write the domain once and serve it as REST, MCP, and Skill from the same spec. → Use cases
See Who is it for? for the full persona map.
| Feature | Description |
|---|---|
| Spec-Driven Integration | Declare capabilities entirely in YAML — no Java required |
| Multi-Protocol Servers | Expose capabilities via MCP, Skill, REST, or Control |
| Data Format Conversion | Protobuf, XML, YAML, CSV, TSV, PSV, Avro, HTML, Markdown → JSON |
| HTTP API Consumption | Bearer, API key, basic, digest, OAuth 2.1 auth out of the box |
| Templating & Querying | Mustache templates and JSONPath expressions for flexible data mapping |
| Inline Scripting | Sandboxed JavaScript, Python, or Groovy steps via GraalVM |
| Domain-Driven Aggregates | Define reusable functions once, reference from multiple adapters |
| OpenAPI Interoperability | Import Swagger 2.0, OAS 3.0/3.1; export REST adapters as OpenAPI |
| Cloud-Native Operations | OTel tracing, RED metrics, Prometheus scrape, single Docker image |
| AI Native | Designed for context engineering and agent orchestration |
For the full feature list see Features.
- Not a code generator. No source files are produced. The spec is the artifact and the runtime contract.
- Not a workflow engine. Multi-step orchestration is supported, but long-running workflows, schedules, and durable state are out of scope.
- Not a service mesh. Ikanos focuses on the application contract; mesh features (mTLS between services, traffic shifting) live below it.
- Installation — install via Docker or native binary
- Use Cases — typical integration scenarios
- Schema — the full reference for every keyword
- Linting Guide — pair Ikanos with Polychro
- Roadmap — what's coming in upcoming alphas
