The Gateway API (gateway-api.sigs.k8s.io (https://gateway-api.sigs.k8s.io/ 14,561 )) is SIG Network's redesign of Ingress: GA since v1.0 (31 October 2023), now at v1.6.2 (3 September 2026). Three ideas set it apart:
Roles. An infrastructure provider supplies a GatewayClass, a cluster operator creates Gateways, and application teams attach Routes from their own namespaces, as the figure shows.
Expressive core. Header matching, weighted backends for canaries, redirects, rewrites and mirroring are typed fields, not annotations, so a route moves between implementations.
More than HTTP. GRPCRoute, TLSRoute and, since v1.6.0, TCPRoute and UDPRoute are in the standard channel.
The API ships as CRDs in a standard and an experimental channel, installed per cluster: cloud-provider-kind 508 installed the v1.5.0 standard bundle on first start.
