Exiting Ingress 201: A Primer on Extension Mechanisms in Gateway API

The presentation discusses the Gateway API extensions and their potential for developers to leverage in their implementations. The Gateway API project provides guidelines and documentation on how to develop extensions, and the community is actively developing enhancement proposals and discussing the future of Gateway API extensions.

• Gateway API extensions are a powerful tool for developers to leverage in their implementations
• Documenting use cases using Gateway API personas can help developers decide which extension point to leverage
• The Gateway API project provides guidelines and documentation on how to develop extensions
• The community is actively developing enhancement proposals and discussing the future of Gateway API extensions

The speaker mentions that there are many Gateway API implementations out there, but few take advantage of the extensions. They encourage developers to get involved in the community and help develop extension best practices or even how Gateway API evolves for mesh management. The speaker also mentions the weekly gamma meetings and the opportunity to collaborate with the upstream community.

Ingress controllers have historically used custom annotations or implementation-specific mechanisms to express advanced features like rate limiting, authN, authZ, and others. This means common features of different projects are configured in a myriad of ways, leaving cluster operators and application developers with a headache when choosing an implementation or migrating between them. Gateway API strives to express traffic routing and other core features in a standardized manner. The project endeavors to approach extension points and future capabilities of the API in the same way. Gateway API offers standardized mechanisms for implementation-specific configuration and a defined process for contributors to push their work upstream to augment the project’s functionality. In this talk, Daneyon Hansen and Sunjay Bhatia, maintainers of Envoy Gateway and Contour, will detail how Gateway API extension mechanisms work and how they fit into this role-oriented and expressive interface. Different personas in the Gateway API model will learn how extensions can be used to fulfill their needs. Examples from various projects will show how community collaboration within a particular implementation and the upstream Gateway API project works to benefit the whole ecosystem.