Gateway API: The Future of Ingress

The nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/* annotation corpus has a distinctive look. After a few years operating nginx-ingress, your manifests accumulate rewrite-target, ssl-redirect, proxy-body-size, configuration-snippet — a private configuration language that only nginx-ingress understands. Switch to Traefik or Contour and you rewrite every annotation. The Ingress API never solved extensibility: it delegated it to annotations, and every controller grew its own dialect.

Gateway API is the replacement. It reached GA with v1.0 in October 2023, v1.1 followed in May 2024. The CKA exam cluster runs Gateway API CRDs from the standard channel (v1.5.0+) — GatewayClasses are already installed. Your job is to create Gateways and Routes, not install controllers. Understanding the design makes the resource model much easier to reason about under time pressure.