Gateway API: A New Set of Kubernetes APIs for Advanced Traffic Routing

The presentation discusses the Gateway API and its use in deploying applications in Kubernetes clusters. It highlights the roles of different employees in the deployment process and the benefits of using Gateway API for day two operations.

• Acme Company wants to launch an e-commerce store on its website and uses Gateway API to deploy the application in Kubernetes clusters
• Different employees have different roles in the deployment process, including infrastructure provider, cluster operator, and application developer
• Gateway API is used to abstract away load balancing infrastructure and enables day two operations such as canary rollout and testing of new load balancers
• The Gateway API is still in v1 alpha one and is being improved with conformance tests and web hook validation
• Feedback from the community is critical for improving the API
• Implementations of Gateway API are already available in Contour, GKE, Istio, Kong, Solo, and Trafic

The presentation includes a demo of how traffic is routed between different clusters using an internal load balancer with an IP address starting with 192.168. This demonstrates the functionality of the Gateway API in enabling traffic to flow between different pods and clusters.

Existing networking APIs like Ingress and Service were designed in the very early days of Kubernetes. They got many things right, but it was quite difficult or even impossible to use those APIs for more advanced use cases. This resulted in a proliferation of implementation-specific annotations and custom resources that fragmented the user experience and have proven to be difficult to evolve. The Kubernetes networking SIG has been developing a new set of APIs that aim to solve these problems. The Gateway APIs project defines Kubernetes APIs to configure advanced concepts like traffic splitting, header matching, and load balancing configuration. In this talk, Harry and Rob will provide an overview of these APIs and some insight into the design decisions that have been made along the way. They will demo some of the advanced capabilities of these APIs, showcasing the portability of the APIs across implementations. Finally, they will provide a roadmap for the future of this project.