One API To Rule Them All? What the Gateway API Means For Service Meshes

Conference: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2022

2022-10-28

Authors: John Howard, Keith Mattix

Summary

The Gateway API should become a universal set of resources to describe all Kubernetes traffic north, south, and east-west. The Gamma Initiative was formed to bring all the benefits that Gateway API has started to succeed at in the Ingress space but to service mesh.

The Gateway API features are not specific to Ingress traffic and can be used for all Kubernetes traffic.
The Gamma Initiative was formed to create a unified API for traffic going both in and out of the cluster and across different services.
The goal is to have a unified API across vendors of meshes and between Ingress and mesh.
The initiative has weekly meetings and resources available for those who want to get involved.
The first big milestone for the project is the support for defining how HTTP traffic works in a service mesh.
The Gamma Initiative aims to make Kubernetes easier for everyone to use.

The speaker wanted to use Gateway API for mesh ever since it was introduced, but was worried about having only one vendor behind it. Eventually, different vendors adopted it for different reasons, with some seeing the API as a solution to real problems. The Gamma Initiative was formed to bring all the benefits of Gateway API to service mesh.

Abstract

The explosion of the service mesh ecosystem over the past 5 years is well-documented; cloud-native users are consistently reaching for common mesh features like advanced traffic routing and policy enforcement(authn/z, timeouts, retries, etc). Unfortunately, the innovation of various service mesh implementations has led to a sprawl in APIs and features that can make life difficult for end-users and tooling providers. In this session, you’ll learn about historical efforts to unify the service mesh space and how the new Kubernetes Gateway API may hold the key to achieving that vision.

Materials:

Tags: