Upgrading Kong Gateway with Kong Ingress Controller

Every Kong Ingress Controller deployment consists of two components that can be upgraded independently (learn more in Deployment methods).

Kong Ingress Controller (a control plane),
Kong Gateway (a data plane).

Learn to upgrade Kong Gateway when running with Kong Ingress Controller.

To see the available Kong Gateway images, refer to Docker Hub:

Prerequisites

Kong Ingress Controller installed using the kong/ingress Helm chart.
Enure your Helm charts repository is up-to-date by running helm repo update.
yq installed (for YAML processing).
Check the version of Kong Gateway and Kong Ingress Controller you’re currently running.
```
  helm get values --all kong -n kong  | yq '{
    "gateway": .gateway.image.repository + ":" + .gateway.image.tag,
    "controller": .controller.ingressController.image.repository + ":" + .controller.ingressController.image.tag
  }'
```
As an output, you should get the versions of Kong Gateway and Kong Ingress Controller deployed in your cluster, for example:
```
  gateway: kong:3.3
  controller: kong/kubernetes-ingress-controller:3.3.1
```
To understand what version of Kong Gateway is compatible with your version of Kong Ingress Controller, refer to the compatibility matrix.

Upgrading Kong Gateway in DB mode

There may be database migrations to run when running Kong Gateway in DB-backed mode. Refer to Upgrade Kong Gateway 3.x.x to learn more about upgrade paths between different versions of Kong Gateway.

Upgrade Kong Gateway using Helm

Edit or create a values.yaml file so that it contains a gateway.image.tag entry. Set this value to the version of Kong Gateway to be installed.
```
 gateway:
   image:
     tag: 3.8.1
```

Run helm upgrade with the --values flag.

 helm upgrade -n kong kong kong/ingress --values values.yaml --wait

The result should look like this:

 Release "kong" has been upgraded. Happy Helming!
 NAME: kong
 LAST DEPLOYED: Fri Nov  3 15:27:49 2023
 NAMESPACE: kong
 STATUS: deployed
 REVISION: 5
 TEST SUITE: None

Pass --wait to helm upgrade to ensure that the command only returns when the rollout finishes successfully.

Verify the upgrade by checking the version of Kong Gateway Deployment running in your cluster.
```
 kubectl get deploy kong-gateway -n kong -ojsonpath='{.spec.template.spec.containers[0].image}'
```
You should see the new version of Kong Gateway:
```
 kong:3.8.1
```