Kong Gateway Operator: Streamlined Kubernetes Gateway Management

Revisit one of our sessions from API Summit 2024!

For organizations leveraging Kubernetes, managing gateways can be a cumbersome process. Traditional approaches often involve juggling separate configurations (e.g. helm), external tools, and manual interventions, leading to significant operational overhead and potential inconsistencies. This complexity is further amplified when scaling your deployments or integrating with cloud-based services. Kong itself intimately understands these challenges. As a company heavily reliant on Kubernetes and our own gateway, we developed a Kubernetes operator that meets our needs. It allows us to manage the configuration and lifecycle management of Gateways on Kubernetes clusters. This ""dogfooding"" experience, where we use our own product for internal purposes, has provided us with invaluable insights into the practicalities of managing Gateways on Kubernetes, and now we’ve open sourced the Kong Gateway Operator (KGO) so that you can benefit from that experience as well.

In this session, we'll delve into the practicalities of harnessing the Kong Gateway Operator for streamlined, native Kubernetes Gateway management. We'll provide a firsthand account of our experiences, including the troubleshooting tips and best practices we've learned during our Cloud Gateways and Kong Gateway Operator journey. You'll gain practical knowledge and avoid potential pitfalls, allowing you to sail smoothly with Gateways on Kubernetes. We’ll show the usage of Gateway API within Kong Gateway Operator and how its usage allows users to use a common interface across different Gateway API implementations.