DevOps Glossary

Kubernetes Gateway API is a Kubernetes Application Programming Interface for defining how external traffic enters a cluster and routes to Services. It extends the older Ingress model with standard resources such as GatewayClass, Gateway, HTTPRoute, TCPRoute, and policy attachments, so platform teams can manage shared load balancers, listeners, hostnames, TLS settings, and routing rules in a consistent way. In practice, an infrastructure team might own the Gateway that exposes ports 80 and 443, while application teams own Routes that send api.example.com to one Service and app.example.com to another. Gateway API is useful for multi-team Kubernetes environments, cloud-native ingress control, service traffic management, and clusters running on managed platforms such as Azure Kubernetes Service. It improves role separation and portability, but it still depends on a compatible controller, such as an ingress or service mesh implementation, to turn the API objects into real networking behavior.