Announcing Envoy Gateway’s 1.0 Release!

Today we’re ecstatic to announce the 1.0 release of Envoy Gateway (EG) for Kubernetes. A mature version ready for widespread adoption in production that simplifies the use of Envoy for managing North-South traffic.

After nearly two years with contributions from over 90 engineers we are proud to say EG meets the goals that Matt outlined in the original post introducing the project, summarized here:

• Built around the (then emerging) Kubernetes Gateway API
• Addresses common needs with a solution that is simple to configure and understand
• Provides great docs for common use cases to enable ease of adoption
• Empowers the community and vendors to drive the project forward through an extensible API

Can’t wait to try it? Visit the EG tasks to get started with Envoy Gateway 1.0

Envoy Gateway 1.0

The 1.0 release brings a lot of functionality. In addition to implementing the full Kubernetes Gateway API – including the awesome Envoy L7 features you love like per-request policy, load balancing, and best-in-class observability – it also goes further, Envoy Gateway 1.0:

• Provides support for common features such as Rate Limiting and OAuth2.0
• Deploys and upgrades Envoy on your behalf, easing operations and lifecycle management
• Introduces extensions to the Kubernetes Gateway API to address Client, Backend, and Security settings and features
• Is easily extensible through the EnvoyPatchPolicy API to allow you to configure any Envoy behavior (including stuff you build yourself!)
• Has a CLI, egctl, for interacting with and debugging the system
• Comes with a large (and growing!) set of scenarios to make common use cases straightforward to implement

What Does 1.0 Mean for the Project?

We won’t be slowing down on feature velocity – if anything, we expect more features to ship as many users who have been following the project and waiting on the GA release get involved. For us, 1.0 means two big things:

• A commitment to ensuring stability with releases for CVE fixes. From 1.0 onwards you can have confidence that the configuration you write today will continue to work in the same way for the foreseeable future.
• That the community is confident in the system’s readiness for general use by everyone, not just Envoy experts.

How We Got Here

The project has moved so fast it feels like a whirlwind, but a high level recap is in order.

• 2022

  • In May, Matt Klein published the original post introducing the project
  • In November, Envoy Gateway passed the entire Kubernetes Gateway API conformance suite for the first time.

• 2023

  • We enabled early adopters to understand target use cases by providing configuration escape valves.
  • The number of project contributors and early adopters were growing and shaping the direction of Envoy Gateway
  • Extensions to Envoy Gateway and the Gateway API to tackle client, backend, and security challenges early adopters were facing, were introduced by the community

• 2024

  • Envoy Gateway 1.0 is ready for widespread adoption thanks to over 90 contributors and the engagement from early production adopters

What’s Next?

Following the 1.0 release, we’ll be focusing on:

• Ease of operation: Continuing to improve the Journey to Production and operability of the system
  • Better metrics dashboards for control plane and data plane observability
  • Exposing more knobs to fine tune more traffic shaping parameters
• Features: More API Gateway features such as authorization (IP Addresses, JWT Claims, API Key, etc.) and compression
• Scale: Building out a performance benchmarking tool into our CI
• Extensibility: We plan on providing a first-class API for data plane extensions such as Lua, WASM, and Ext Proc to enable users to implement their custom use cases
• Outside of Kubernetes: Running Envoy Gateway in non-k8s environments - this has been an explicit goal and we’d like to focus on this in the coming months. Envoy Proxy already supports running on bare metal environments, with Envoy Gateway users getting the added advantage of a simpler API
• Debug: And a lot of capabilities with the egctl CLI

Get Started

If you’ve been looking to use Envoy as a Gateway, check out our quickstart guide and give it a try! If you’re interested in contributing, check out our guide for getting involved!

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