Kubernetes Gateway API is the modern successor to Ingress — more expressive, extensible, and developed by SIG Network. Unlike classic Ingress, it separates roles clearly (GatewayClass, Gateway, HTTPRoute), supports traffic splitting and header manipulation natively, and works the same way regardless of the provider (Istio, Cilium, Envoy Gateway).

I put together practical examples in k8s-gateway-api covering three approaches on a local KinD cluster: classic NGINX Ingress, Gateway API with KinD’s built-in controller, and Gateway API with Istio for full service mesh integration. The whole setup is automated and fits in a handful of commands — a good way to learn the standard without cloud access.