Tutorial: Implement A Nginx Gateway Fabric As An Alternative To Ingress

The Kubernetes ecosystem is undergoing a basal displacement successful really it manages outer traffic. On Nov. 12, 2025, Kubernetes announced nan status of Ingress Nginx, 1 of nan astir wide deployed components successful unreality autochthonal infrastructure. Best-effort attraction continues until March 2026, aft which nan repository will move to read-only status, pinch nary further information patches, bug fixes, aliases characteristic releases.

This marks a captious inflection constituent for organizations moving Kubernetes clusters. The accepted Ingress API, while battle-tested and acquainted to generations of engineers, has reached nan limits of its design. It lacks support for precocious postulation guidance patterns, forces teams to wrestle pinch vendor-specific annotations, and cannot definitive blase routing rules needed for modern applications.

The Kubernetes Gateway API emerges arsenic nan successor, which is simply a standardized, extensible model that addresses these basal limitations. Rather than relying connected fragmented implementations and proprietary annotations, Gateway API introduces a unified exemplary that supports multiprotocol routing (L4 and L7), fine-grained postulation control, header-based shape matching, petition mirroring, and autochthonal postulation metrics.

Achieving General Availability successful 2023, Gateway API represents nan Kubernetes community’s reply to nan ingress problem. For a elaborate comparison of Ingress controller and Gateway, mention to my erstwhile article published successful The New Stack.

One of nan early implementations of nan Gateway API is Nginx Gateway Fabric, which is an unfastened source, conformant implementation of nan Kubernetes Gateway API that uses Nginx arsenic its high-performance information plane. It separates power level and information level concerns, dynamically provisioning Nginx instances for each Gateway assets while translating Gateway API resources into Nginx configurations. Unlike traditional Ingress controllers, Nginx Gateway Fabric delivers precocious capabilities retired of nan box, including blue-green and canary deployments, A/B testing, request/response manipulation, and multitenant role-based governance.

This tutorial will guideline you done implementing nan Gateway API based connected Nginx Gateway Fabric, helping you hole your infrastructure for nan post-Ingress era. We will commencement pinch a acquainted Kubernetes deployment pinch 2 services: 1 for nan web and 1 for nan API. We will usage nan Gateway API to way HTTP postulation to these 2 soul ClusterIP services.

For this tutorial, I americium utilizing a K3s cluster moving wrong a Multipass VM. But you tin usage immoderate Kubernetes situation to complete nan steps explained successful this guide.

Step 1: Define and Deploy nan Sample App

We will specify 2 deployments and services to expose nan web and api endpoints arsenic ClusterIP services successful nan demo namespace.

Apply nan YAML and cheque if nan pods and services are up and running.

Our extremity is to way postulation to nan demo-api and demo-app endpoints done nan Gateway API.

Step 2: Deploy Nginx Gateway Fabric

We will first instal nan CRDs required by nan gateway.

Then, we will deploy Nginx Gateway Fabric done nan Helm chart.

Notice that we are exposing nan work type arsenic NodePort. If you are utilizing a managed Kubernetes environment, alteration this to LoadBalancer.

Verify nan installation by checking nan nginx-gateway

The adjacent measurement is to deploy nan Gateway that exertion developers will usage to specify nan way to their services moving wrong their namespaces.

Apply nan YAML record and verify that nan gateway is created correctly.

We tin spot that nan gateway has been created and is exposed via nan NodePort 31678.

Step 3: Define nan Route to nan Sample App

With nan gateway successful place, it’s clip to create nan route. This is typically done by nan developers who are deploying their app successful Kubernetes. Route runs wrong nan aforesaid namespace arsenic nan application.

Define nan way and deploy it.

This created an HTTPRoute for nan endpoints exposed by nan sample application.

Step 4: Access nan HTTP Endpoints Exposed by nan Gateway

We are fresh to trial nan routes defined by nan gateway.

Given that my VM’s IP reside is 192.168.2.5 and nan NodePort is 31678, I tin make a cURL petition to trial nan endpoints.

We person successfully implemented nan Gateway API to expose soul endpoints to nan outer users. In nan upcoming tutorials, I will locomotion done nan steps to instrumentality TLS-based routing. Stay tuned!

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