kgateway-dev/kgateway

kgateway is a piece of software that acts as a traffic controller for applications running inside Kubernetes, the popular system companies use to run many small software services at once. When those services need to talk to the outside world or to each other, kgateway sits in between and decides how to route each request, who is allowed to make it, and how many requests to accept per minute. It is written in Go and processes billions of API calls for large companies. At its core, kgateway is built on Envoy, a high-performance networking proxy that handles the actual movement of network traffic. kgateway provides the control layer on top of Envoy: it reads configuration rules and translates them into instructions Envoy can act on. This design means operators write configuration once, and Envoy carries out the work at very high speed. The project started in 2018 under the name Gloo, built by a company called Solo.io. It became production-ready in 2019 and has been in active use since then. It was later renamed kgateway and became a sandbox project under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, the same organization that oversees Kubernetes itself. kgateway supports three main scenarios. First, it can expose internal APIs to the outside internet and apply rules like login checks, permission controls, and rate limits from a single place. Second, it helps teams gradually move old applications to newer architectures by routing some traffic to the old system and some to the new one at the same time. Third, large organizations with many teams can each configure their own routing rules without interfering with one another, using features like route delegation and composable policy layers. The README does not include a quick-start install section, so readers looking to set it up should visit the official documentation at kgateway.dev. The source code, community Slack, and project blog are all publicly available.