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Managed Gateways

Kong Gateway Operator reconciles Gateway resources differently to Kong Ingress Controller. KGO’s approach is known as managed gateways, and the KIC approach is referred to as unmanaged gateways.

Managed Gateways

When Kong Gateway Operator detects a new Gateway, it creates a ControlPlane (Kong Ingress Controller) and a DataPlane (Kong Gateway). This ControlPlane reconciles exactly one Gateway.

As Kong Gateway Operator manages the lifecycle of Kong Gateway deployments, it can dynamically configure the DataPlane based on information in the Gateway listeners.

For example, when creating a Gateway with only one HTTP listener on port 80, the DataPlane ingress service will be configured so that only port 80 will be exposed. If you add a Gateway HTTPS listener on port 443, this change will be taken by Kong Gateway Operator and applied to the DataPlane. The final result will be an ingress service exposing ports 80 for HTTP traffic and 443 for HTTPS traffic.

Port 80 and 443 are only examples. You can configure any combination of Gateway listeners that you need, and Kong Gateway Operator will configure your DataPlane appropriately.

Unmanaged Gateways

Using Kong Ingress Controller without Kong Gateway Operator results in all Gateway resources being merged in to a single configuration. Kong Gateway deployments are created externally to Kong Ingress Controller, which means that we cannot dynamically control the configuration in response to Gateway listeners.

When using unmanaged mode, routes from all Gateway instances are merged together and sent to all Kong Gateway instances being managed by the single Kong Ingress Controller.