The Kubernetes Gateway API is the modern standard for managing traffic within a cluster. While many cloud providers offer managed gateway services, running a cluster-native implementation like Traefik provides significant advantages in terms of cost, portability, and control. By self-hosting your gateway, you eliminate the fixed monthly fees associated with managed cloud services and ensure that your infrastructure remains vendor-neutral.
Why Use Traefik for the Gateway API?
Traefik has long been a favorite in the Kubernetes ecosystem as an Ingress controller. Its evolution into a Gateway API implementation brings several key benefits:
- Cost Efficiency: You only pay for the compute resources the pods consume and a standard load balancer, avoiding expensive managed gateway tiers.
- Simplified Management: Traefik’s Helm chart can automatically handle the installation of the Gateway API Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs).
- Portability: Moving between cloud providers or to on-premises hardware requires zero changes to your traffic manifests.
Installation Guide
Setting up Traefik as your Gateway API controller is a streamlined process using Helm. Unlike other implementations, Traefik can bundle the necessary CRDs into the installation, making it a single-command setup.
1. Deploying via Helm
The most critical configuration step is explicitly enabling the Gateway API feature during the Helm installation. Without this flag, Traefik will default to its traditional Ingress behavior.
2. Verification
Once installed, the controller will automatically create a GatewayClass and a Gateway resource. You can verify the status of these resources to ensure the implementation is “Programmed” and ready to receive traffic.
Configuration Tweaks for Multi-Namespace Support
By default, the automatically generated Gateway resource may restrict traffic to the same namespace where the controller is installed. To allow the gateway to serve applications across your entire cluster, you must update the allowedRoutes configuration in the Gateway manifest to permit routes from all namespaces.
Note: Traefik defaults to port 8000 for its standard web listener instead of the traditional port 80.
Deploying an HTTPRoute
To route traffic to a specific application, you define an HTTPRoute. This resource connects the Traefik Gateway to your backend service based on path or hostname matching. This ensures that the traffic hitting the Traefik entry point is correctly routed to your internal cluster services.
Conclusion
Implementing the Gateway API with Traefik offers a robust, high-performance solution for Kubernetes traffic management. By keeping the gateway inside the cluster, you maintain full control over your routing logic while keeping infrastructure costs to a minimum. This setup ensures that your applications are ready for a multi-cloud or hybrid-cloud future without the friction of vendor-specific configurations.
You can find all the code sample on GitHub.
This post was AI-generated based on the transcript of the video “Deploy Traefik Gateway API on AKS in Minutes - Part 14” and reviewed by me.
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