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API Overview

This document provides an overview of Gateway API.

Roles and personas.

There are 3 primary roles in Gateway API:

  • Infrastructure Provider
  • Cluster Operator
  • Application Developer

There could be a fourth role of Application Admin in some use cases.

Please refer to the roles and personas section in the Security model for details.

Resource model

Note: Resources will initially live in the networking.x-k8s.io API group as Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs). Unqualified resource names will implicitly be in this API group.

There are three main types of objects in our resource model:

GatewayClass defines a set of gateways with a common configuration and behavior.

Gateway requests a point where traffic can be translated to Services within the cluster.

Routes describe how traffic coming via the Gateway maps to the Services.

GatewayClass

GatewayClass defines a set of Gateways that share a common configuration and behaviour. Each GatewayClass will be handled by a single controller, although controllers MAY handle more than one GatewayClass.

GatewayClass is a cluster-scoped resource. There MUST be at least one GatewayClass defined in order to be able to have functional Gateways. A controller that implements the Gateway API does so by providing an associated GatewayClass resource that the user can reference from their Gateway(s).

This is similar to IngressClass for Ingress and StorageClass for PersistentVolumes. In Ingress v1beta1, the closest analog to GatewayClass is the ingress-class annotation, and in IngressV1, the closest analog is the IngressClass object.

Gateway

A Gateway describes how traffic can be translated to Services within the cluster. That is, it defines a request for a way to translate traffic from somewhere that does not know about Kubernetes to somewhere that does. For example, traffic sent to a Kubernetes Service by a cloud load balancer, an in-cluster proxy, or an external hardware load balancer. While many use cases have client traffic originating “outside” the cluster, this is not a requirement.

It defines a request for a specific load balancer config that implements the GatewayClass’ configuration and behaviour contract. The resource MAY be created by an operator directly, or MAY be created by a controller handling a GatewayClass.

As the Gateway spec captures user intent, it may not contain a complete specification for all attributes in the spec. For example, the user may omit fields such as addresses, TLS settings. This allows the controller managing the GatewayClass to provide these settings for the user, resulting in a more portable spec. This behaviour will be made clear using the GatewayClass Status object.

A Gateway MAY contain one or more Route references which serve to direct traffic for a subset of traffic to a specific service.

{HTTP,TCP,Foo}Route

Route objects define protocol-specific rules for mapping requests from a Gateway to Kubernetes Services.

HTTPRoute and TCPRoute are currently the only defined Route objects. Additional protocol-specific Route objects may be added in the future.

BackendPolicy

BackendPolicy provides a way to configure connections between a Gateway and a backend. For the purpose of this API, a backend is any resource that a route can forward traffic to. A common example of a backend is a Service. Configuration at this level is currently limited to TLS, but will expand in the future to support more advanced policies such as health checking.

Some backend configuration may vary depending on the Route that is targeting the backend. In those cases, configuration fields will be placed on Routes and not BackendPolicy. For more information on what may be configured with this resource in the future, refer to the related GitHub issue.

Route binding

When a Route binds to a Gateway it represents configuration that is applied on the Gateway that configures the underlying load balancer or proxy. How and which Routes bind to Gateways is controlled by the resources themselves. Route and Gateway resources have built-in controls to permit or constrain how they select each other. This is useful for enforcing organizational policies for how Routes are exposed and on which Gateways. Consider the following example:

A Kubernetes cluster admin has deployed a Gateway “shared-gw” in the “Infra” Namespace to be used by different application teams for exposing their applications outside the cluster. Teams A and B (in Namespaces “A” and “B” respectively) bind their Routes to this Gateway. They are unaware of each other and as long as their Route rules do not conflict with each other they can continue operating in isolation. Team C has special networking needs (perhaps performance, security, or criticality) and they need a dedicated Gateway to proxy their application to the outside world. Team C deploys their own Gateway “dedicated-gw” in the “C” Namespace that can only be used by apps in the "C" Namespace.

route binding

There is a lot of flexibility in how Routes can bind to Gateways to achieve different organizational policies and scopes of responsibility. These are different relationships that Gateways and Routes can have:

  • One-to-one - A Gateway and Route may be deployed and used by a single owner and have a one-to-one relationship. Team C is an example of this.
  • One-to-many - A Gateway can have many Routes bound to it that are owned by different teams from across different Namespaces. Teams A and B are an example of this.
  • Many-to-one - Routes can also be bound to more than one Gateway, allowing a single Route to control application exposure simultaneously across different IPs, load balancers, or networks.

In summary, Gateways select Routes and Routes control their exposure. When a Gateway selects a Route that allows itself to be exposed, then the Route will bind to the Gateway. When Routes are bound to a Gateway it means their collective routing rules are configured on the underlying load balancers or proxies that are managed by that Gateway. Thus, a Gateway is a logical representation of a networking data plane that can be configured through Routes.

Route Selection

A Gateway selects routes based on the Route metadata, specifically the kind, namespace, and labels of Route resources. Routes are actually bound to specific listeners within the Gateway so each listener has a listener.routes field which selects Routes by one or more of the following criterea:

  • Label - A Gateway can select Routes via labels that exist on the resource (similar to how Services select Pods via Pod labels).
  • Kind - A Gateway listener can only select a single type of Route resource. This could be an HTTPRoute, TCPRoute, or a custom Route type.
  • Namespace - A Gateway can also control from which Namespaces Routes can be selected via the namespaces.from field. It supports three possible values:
    • SameNamespace is the default option. Only Routes in the same namespace as this Gateway will be selected.
    • All will select Routes from all Namespaces.
    • Selector means that Routes from a subset of Namespaces selected by a Namespace label selector will be selected by this Gateway. When Selector is used then the listeners.routes.namespaces.selector field can be used to specify label selectors. This field is not supported with All or SameNamespace.

The below Gateway will select all HTTPRoute resources with the expose: prod-web-gw across all Namespaces in the cluster.

kind: Gateway
...
spec:
  listeners:
  - routes:
      kind: HTTPRoute
      selector:
        matchLabels:
          expose: prod-web-gw
      namespaces:
        from: All

Route Exposure

Routes can determine how they are exposed through Gateways. The gateways.allow field supports three values:

  • All is the default value if none is specified. This leaves all binding to the Route label and Namespace selectors on the Gateway.
  • SameNamespace only allows this Route to bind with Gateways from the same Namespace.
  • FromList allows an explicit list of Gateways to be specifiied that a Route will bind with. gateways.gatewayRefs is only supported with this option.

The following my-route Route selects only the foo-gateway in the foo-namespace and will not be able to bind with any other Gateways. Note that foo-gateway is in a different Namespace. If the foo-gateway allows cross-Namespace binding and also selects this Route then my-route will bind to it.

kind: HTTPRoute
metadata:
  name: my-route
  namespace: bar-namespace
spec:
  gateways:
    allow: FromList
    gatewayRefs:
    - name: foo-gateway
      namespace: foo-namespace

Note that Gateway and Route binding is bi-directional. This means that both resources must select each other for them to bind. If a Gateway has Route label selectors that do not match any existing Route then nothing will bind to it even if a Route's spec.gateways.allow = All. Similarly, if a Route references a specific Gateway, but that Gateway is not selecting the Route's Namespace, then they will not bind. A binding will only take place if both resources select each other.

It may not always be apparent from the resource specifications which Gateways and Routes are bound, but binding can be determined from the resource status. The Route status will list all of the Gateways that a Route is bound to and any relevant conditions for the binding.

Combined types

The combination of GatewayClass, Gateway, xRoute and Service(s) will define an implementable load-balancer. The diagram below illustrates the relationships between the different resources:

schema

Request flow

A typical client/gateway API request flow for a gateway implemented using a reverse proxy is:

  1. A client makes a request to http://foo.example.com.
  2. DNS resolves the name to a Gateway address.
  3. The reverse proxy receives the request on a Listener and uses the Host header to match an HTTPRoute.
  4. Optionally, the reverse proxy can perform request header and/or path matching based on match rules of the HTTPRoute.
  5. Optionally, the reverse proxy can modify the request, i.e. add/remove headers, based on filter rules of the HTTPRoute.
  6. Lastly, the reverse proxy forwards the request to one or more objects, i.e. Service, in the cluster based on forwardTo rules of the HTTPRoute.

TLS Configuration

TLS is configured on Gateway listeners. Additionally, TLS certificates can be configured on route objects for certain self-service use cases.

Please refer to TLS details for a deep dive on TLS.

Extension points

A number of extension points are provided in the API to provide flexibility in addressing the large number of use-cases that cannot be addressed by a general purpose API.

Here is a summary of extension points in the API:

  • XRouteMatch.ExtensionRef: This extension point should be used to extend the match semantics of a specific core Route. This is an experimental extension point and will be iterated on in future based on feedback.
  • XForwardTo.BackendRef: This extension point should be used for forwarding traffic to network endpoints other than core Kubernetes Service resource. Examples include an S3 bucket, Lambda function, a file-server, etc.
  • HTTPRouteFilter: This API type in HTTPRoute provides a way to hook into the request/response lifecycle of an HTTP request.
  • Custom Routes: If none of the above extensions points suffice for a use case, Implementers can chose to create custom Route resources for protocols that are not currently supported in the API.

Whenever you are using an extension point without any prior art, please let the community know. As we learn more about usage of extension points, we would like to find the common denominators and promote the features to core/extended API conformance.

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