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How Do I Choose? Kubernetes Ingress Vs Gateway API Vs Service Mesh

Author

Govardhana M K
September 11, 2025

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🧠 DEEP DIVE USE CASE

How Do I Choose? Kubernetes Ingress Vs Gateway API Vs Service Mesh

Kubernetes gives you multiple ways to manage how traffic enters and flows inside the cluster. The three common choices are Ingress, Gateway API, and Service Mesh.

  1. Ingress helps you expose applications to the outside world.

  2. Gateway API extends that model with support for more protocols and modern routing needs.

  3. Service Mesh shifts the focus to secure and reliable communication between services inside the cluster.

Before deciding, it is important to understand what problem each one is built to solve.

1. Ingress

Ingress manages external HTTP and HTTPS traffic into a Kubernetes cluster. It connects requests from outside the cluster to the right service inside, works with an Ingress Controller such as NGINX, HAProxy, or Traefik.

Practical Caveats:

  • Tied to HTTP: No built in support for TCP, UDP, or gRPC.

  • Cluster scoped: You configure Ingress at the cluster level, making it less flexible for multi-team or multi-tenant scenarios.

  • Limited Extensibility: Annotations and custom CRDs are needed for advanced use cases like rate limiting, header modifications, and multi-tenancy.

  • No Fine grained Routing Control: Ingress only supports host/path-based routing, meaning complex routing logic often needs workarounds with annotations or controller specific features.

  • Network Policies Conflicts: Ingress does not inherently respect NetworkPolicy configurations, leading to cases where traffic gets routed despite restrictive policies.

❝

Ingress remains a solid choice for teams starting out, but once multiple teams, protocols, or advanced policies come into play, it starts showing cracks.

2. Gateway API

Gateway API extends traffic management in Kubernetes by adding native support for multiple protocols, namespace level delegation, and built in policy definitions that Ingress does not provide.

  • Multi protocol support: Native support for HTTP, TCP, UDP, and gRPC through HTTPRoute, TCPRoute, and UDPRoute resources. This allows you to define traffic rules beyond just HTTP(S).

  • Namespace scoped delegation: You can run multiple Gateways in the same cluster, each scoped to a namespace. making it ideal for multi tenant architectures.

  • Separation of responsibilities: Platform or cluster admins manage the Gateways, while application teams attach their own HTTPRoute, TCPRoute, or UDPRoute objects. This removes the bottleneck of every change depending on the admin.

  • Policy Enforcement: Features like rate limiting, retries, header modification, and traffic splitting are available as API resources. These are part of the spec, not custom annotations, which makes them portable across implementations.

  • Vendor consistency: Behaviors are standardized across different controllers and vendors, reducing the lock in and inconsistencies that Ingress often introduces.

With these basics, let us understand Kubernetes Service Mesh before getting into when to use what.

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