Gateway API

Kong are proud to be a driving force behind the Kubernetes Gateway API standard. Since being part of the originating team at Kubecon San Diego 2019, we’ve continued to actively invest in the project with multiple contributors in maintainer and reviewer roles. Kong are all-in on Gateway API as the future of Kubernetes networking.

Kong Ingress Controller was the first submitted conformance report, and is 100% compliant with the core conformance tests (in addition to many extended tests). Kong has implemented the Gateway API resources as first-class citizens, converting them directly in to Kong Gateway configuration rather than using intermediate CRDs. This makes the Gateway API CRDs a native language for Kong Ingress Controller.

The Ingress resource will continue to be supported in Kong Ingress Controller, but we highly recommend that new users adopt Gateway API resources such as HTTPRoute.

GatewayClass and Gateway

The GatewayClass object performs the same duties as the IngressClass resource. A GatewayClass represents a set of Gateways that are managed by the same Ingress Controller. They share any values provided in the GatewayClass.spec.parametersRef which control how the Gateways are deployed.

A Gateway is a 1:1 mapping to the deployment of a hardware or software load balancer. With Kong Ingress Controller a Gateway corresponds to a deployment of Kong Gateway.

When using Kong Ingress Controller without the Kong Gateway Operator the GatewayClass has a konghq.com/gatewayclass-unmanaged: 'true' annotation to indicate that it is manually configured.

To create a GatewayClass and Gateway with Kong Ingress Controller run the following:

echo "
---
apiVersion: gateway.networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: GatewayClass
metadata:
  name: kong
  annotations:
    konghq.com/gatewayclass-unmanaged: 'true'

spec:
  controllerName: konghq.com/kic-gateway-controller
---
apiVersion: gateway.networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: Gateway
metadata:
  name: kong
spec:
  gatewayClassName: kong
  listeners:
  - name: proxy
    port: 80
    protocol: HTTP
" | kubectl apply -f -

Available Route Types

Kong Ingress Controller supports multiple Gateway API route types: