Technology · Ebook

Contour: Envoy-Powered Ingress for Kubernetes

by Shriira Press

Contour is an ingress controller for Kubernetes — a control plane that programs the high-performance Envoy proxy to route external traffic to services inside your cluster. This free book teaches it from the ground up: the ingress problem and what Contour is, the Kubernetes Ingress resource and its limitations, Contour's architecture (the control-plane/data-plane split, Contour configuring Envoy via xDS), getting traffic in (load balancers, the request path), HTTPProxy (Contour's richer, validated, delegation-capable resource), routing and load balancing (host/path/header conditions, strategies, health checks), TLS and secure traffic (termination, cert-manager, mTLS), advanced traffic management (canary traffic splitting, timeouts, retries, rate limiting), the Gateway API and its role-oriented model, and operating Contour in practice. Ten focused chapters with clear diagrams that demystify how external traffic gets into a Kubernetes cluster — routed, secured, and managed — through an Envoy-powered ingress gateway.

Contents

1. 1Preface
2. 2Chapter 1 — What Contour Is
3. 3Chapter 2 — The Ingress Problem and the Ingress Resource
4. 4Chapter 3 — Contour's Architecture
5. 5Chapter 4 — Getting Traffic In
6. 6Chapter 5 — HTTPProxy: Contour's Richer Resource
7. 7Chapter 6 — Routing and Load Balancing
8. 8Chapter 7 — TLS and Secure Traffic
9. 9Chapter 8 — Advanced Traffic Management
10. 10Chapter 9 — The Gateway API and Roles
11. 11Chapter 10 — Operating Contour in Practice