Introduction on Envoy Gateway

The Gateway API

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Before You Begin

You may want to be familiar with:

Overview

The Gateway API is a Kubernetes API designed to provide a consistent, expressive, and extensible method for managing network traffic into and within a Kubernetes cluster, compared to the legacy Ingress API. It introduces core resources such as GatewayClass and Gateway and various route types like HTTPRoute and TLSRoute, which allow you to define how traffic is routed, secured, and exposed.

API Gateways

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Overview

An API gateway is a centralized entry point for managing, securing, and routing requests to backend services. It handles cross-cutting concerns, like authentication, rate limiting, and protocol translation, so individual services don’t have to. Decoupling clients from internal systems simplifies scaling, enforces consistency, and reduces redundancy.

Use Cases

Use an API Gateway to:

Avoid duplicating logic across microservices.
Create a central point of control for access, monitoring, and traffic rules.
Expose internal services to the public internet.
Provide protocol support for HTTP, gRPC, or TLS.
Enforce policies and see traffic metrics at the edge.

API Gateways in relation to Envoy Gateway

Under the hood, Envoy Proxy is a powerful, production-grade proxy that supports many of the capabilities you’d expect from an API Gateway, like traffic routing, retries, TLS termination, observability, and more. However, configuring Envoy directly can be complex and verbose.

Proxy

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Overview

A proxy server is an intermediary between a client (like a web browser) and another server (like an API server). When the client makes a request, the proxy forwards it to the destination server, receives the response, and then sends it back to the client.

Proxies are used to enhance security, manage traffic, anonymize user activity, or optimize performance through caching and load balancing features. In cloud environments, they often handle critical tasks such as request routing, TLS termination, authentication, and traffic shaping.