Gateway API, a service network model component - Container Service for Kubernetes

The Gateway API is a collection of resources in Kubernetes for modeling service network traffic. It provides an expressive, extensible, and role-oriented service network model. This topic describes the Gateway API component, how to use it, and its change history.

Component overview

The Gateway API is a collection of resources in Kubernetes for modeling service network traffic. It is designed to provide an expressive, extensible, and role-oriented service network model. It offers the following advantages:

Role-oriented: Resource abstractions align with the organizational structure of teams that use Kubernetes.
Portable: Similar to Ingress, the Gateway API supports multiple implementations.
Expressive: Supports structured configurations for advanced traffic management, such as phased and weighted releases. This avoids the need to use annotations for these capabilities, which is common with Ingress.
Extensible: Supports attaching Custom Resources (CRs) to resources at various layers of the Gateway API. This allows for fine-grained feature configuration.

Usage

You can choose a Gateway API implementation from the open-source community and then use the Gateway API to configure your service network. For more information about supported Gateway API implementations, see Implementations.

Release notes

June 2025

Version number	Change Time	Changes	Impact
v1.3.0	June 5, 2025	Supports percentage-based traffic mirroring. For more changes, see the community release notes.	This upgrade does not affect your services.

December 2024

Version number	Modification Time	Changes	Impact
v1.2.1	December 26, 2024	This component version supports only clusters that run Kubernetes 1.32 or later. The `v1alpha2` versions of GRPCRoute and ReferenceGrant are deprecated. Supports setting backend timeouts in HTTPRoute. Supports setting the backend protocol using BackendProtocol. For more changes, see the community release notes.	The deprecation of the `v1alpha2` API may cause components that depend on it to stop working. Before you upgrade, confirm that all components use the new API version.

May 2024

Version number	Modification Time	Changes	Impact
v1.1.0	May 23, 2024	This component version supports only clusters that run Kubernetes 1.30 or later. The `v1alpha2` API versions of Gateway, GatewayClass, and HTTPRoute are deprecated. GRPCRoute and Service Mesh support are now generally available (GA). For more changes, see the community release notes.	The deprecation of the `v1alpha2` API may cause components that depend on it to stop working. Before you upgrade, confirm that all components use the new API version.

February 2024

Version number	Modification Time	Changes	Impact
v1.0.1	February 1, 2024	This component version supports only clusters that run Kubernetes 1.28 or later. Gateway, GatewayClass, and HTTPRoute are now generally available (GA) and provide a `v1` API. Supports configuration validation using Common Expression Language (CEL). For more changes, see the community release notes.	This upgrade does not affect your services.

January 2023

Version number	Modification Time	Changes	Impact
v0.6.0	January 11, 2023	The component is published.	This upgrade does not affect your services.