If you work on Kubernetes platform you must have used Ingress as the go-to resource for exposing HTTP(S) services outside the cluster. It's been simple, widely supported, and mostly… good enough. But as cloud-native applications evolve, microservices multiply, and traffic management becomes more complex, developers and platform teams are hitting the limits of what Ingress can offer.

Enter the Gateway API — a modern, extensible, and more expressive successor to Ingress. If you're wondering whether Ingress is becoming “old school,” you’re not wrong. The real question is: When should you switch? Let’s explore.

🚪 The Limits of Ingress

• Limited expressiveness: Only supports HTTP(S) out of the box, and configuring things like TCP, gRPC, or TLS passthrough is vendor-specific.
• Annotation overload: Every implementation (NGINX, Traefik, Istio, etc.) uses its own annotations, making portability and consistency a nightmare.
• Single point of configuration: You often end up cramming everything — routing, security, timeouts, retries — into a single Ingress object.
• Lack of RBAC separation: There's no clean separation between infrastructure and app teams when managing Ingress resources.

🎉 Meet Gateway API: Ingress Reimagined

The Gateway API is a Kubernetes-native standard designed to replace and improve upon Ingress. It's not just a new object — it's a new model for traffic routing in Kubernetes that emphasizes modularity, extensibility, and role separation.

Key Features

• Decoupled resources: Define infrastructure-level config (GatewayClass, Gateway) separately from routing config (HTTPRoute, TCPRoute, etc.).
• Rich traffic control: Native support for path-based routing, header-based matching, weighted traffic splitting, and more.
• Multi-protocol support: Built-in support for HTTP, HTTPS, TCP, TLS, and gRPC.
• Clear role boundaries: Cluster operators manage Gateways, developers define Routes.
• Standardized cross-provider behavior: Reduced reliance on vendor-specific annotations.

🔄 When to Switch

Not everyone needs to abandon Ingress right now, but there are clear use cases where Gateway API is the better choice:

✅ You Should Switch If:

• You’re building a platform for multiple teams – Clean RBAC boundaries between infra and app teams.
• You need advanced routing – Weighted traffic splitting, header- or method-based routing, native gRPC/TCP.
• You’re using a service mesh – Most meshes are adopting Gateway API as the standard ingress mechanism.
• You want portability across providers – Gateway API is becoming a Kubernetes standard supported by many vendors.
• You're modernizing your infrastructure – Adopting GitOps, multi-tenancy, and platform engineering practices.

🚠 Ingress vs. Gateway API: Quick Comparison

Feature	Ingress	Gateway API
Resource Model	Monolithic	Modular (Gateway, Route)
Protocol Support	HTTP/HTTPS only	HTTP, HTTPS, TCP, gRPC, TLS
Advanced Routing	Limited (via annotations)	Native, expressive
Role Separation	No	Yes
Portability	Low (vendor-specific)	High (standardized)
Observability/Status	Limited	Rich status reporting

🧪 How to Get Started

Want to test Gateway API? Here's a simple example:

apiVersion: gateway.networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: Gateway
metadata:
  name: my-gateway
spec:
  gatewayClassName: istio
  listeners:
  - name: http
    protocol: HTTP
    port: 80
    allowedRoutes:
      namespaces:
        from: Same

apiVersion: gateway.networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: HTTPRoute
metadata:
  name: my-route
spec:
  parentRefs:
  - name: my-gateway
  rules:
  - matches:
    - path:
        type: PathPrefix
        value: /app
    backendRefs:
    - name: my-service
      port: 80

🚦 Is Ingress Going Away?

Not immediately. Ingress is still widely supported and maintained. But its evolution is effectively frozen. Gateway API is the future of Kubernetes networking, and the ecosystem is moving there fast.

🏆 Final Thoughts

Ingress served us well. But Kubernetes has grown up, and your networking layer should too. Gateway API offers a modern, expressive, and scalable way to handle service exposure in today’s complex cloud-native environments.

Is Ingress going away? Maybe. Is this right time to switch? Definitely.