Successful Transition: ingress2gateway for an Easy Migration to the Gateway API

Today, we introduce ingress2gateway, a tool that assists you in migrating from Ingress to the Gateway API. The Gateway API is on the verge of its GA release—so if you haven’t made the switch yet, now is the perfect time!

Background

In the ever-evolving world of Kubernetes, networking technology plays a crucial role. With the increasing number of applications in Kubernetes clusters, effectively delivering these services to clients becomes a critical challenge. If you are already working with Kubernetes, you are likely familiar with the Ingress API, which serves as the standard solution for external access to services.

The Ingress API provides a way to route external traffic to your applications within the cluster, making it an indispensable tool for many Kubernetes users. However, Ingress has its limitations, and as application complexity and demands on your Kubernetes clusters grow, these limitations can lead to bottlenecks.

Some of the limitations include:

• Insufficient Common Denominator - Ingress attempts to establish a common denominator for various HTTP proxies, allowing only basic HTTP routing. Features of modern proxies like traffic splitting and header matching must be offloaded into vendor-specific, non-portable annotations.
• Insufficient Permission Model - The Ingress specification configures both infrastructure and application logic in a single object. With Ingress, the cluster operator and application developer work on the same Ingress object without being aware of each other’s roles. This leads to insufficient role-based access protection and poses a high risk of configuration errors.
• Lack of Protocol Diversity - Ingress primarily focuses on HTTP(S) routing and does not natively support other protocols like TCP, UDP, and gRPC. This limitation makes it less suitable for handling non-HTTP workloads.

Gateway API

To overcome these issues, the Gateway API was developed to provide a more flexible, extensible, and powerful way to manage traffic to your services.

The Gateway API is nearing its GA (General Availability) release. It offers a standardized Kubernetes API for controlling incoming traffic. It is characterized by enhanced functionality, improved customization options, and greater flexibility. By focusing on modular and expressive API resources, the Gateway API enables the description of a broader range of routing configurations and models.

The transition from the Ingress API to the Gateway API in Kubernetes is driven by the advantages and advanced features that the Gateway API offers. Its foundations are based on four core principles: a role-oriented approach, portability, expressiveness, and extensibility.

With tools like ingress2gateway, the transition to the Gateway API becomes easier, allowing developers and DevOps teams to make their Kubernetes environments more effective. ayedo supports you as a Kubernetes partner, helping you find the best solutions for your needs.

Source: Kubernetes Blog