Technology · Ebook

kgateway: The Cloud-Native API and AI Gateway

by Shriira Press

kgateway is a Kubernetes-native API gateway and AI gateway built on the Envoy proxy and the Kubernetes Gateway API. It began as Gloo in 2018, ran in thousands of production environments, and was donated by Solo.io to the CNCF in 2025 as a sandbox project. Acting as the front door to your services, it routes external traffic to the right backend while applying traffic management, security, and resilience policies — and increasingly governs traffic to large language models and AI agents. This book builds understanding from the ground up: the API gateway problem, the Gateway API standard, kgateway's control-plane and data-plane architecture, the proxies it deploys, traffic management, security, the AI gateway, agentgateway, and running it all in practice.

Contents

1. 1Preface
2. 2Chapter 1 — What kgateway Is
3. 3Chapter 2 — The Kubernetes Gateway API
4. 4Chapter 3 — Architecture: Control Plane and Data Plane
5. 5Chapter 4 — Gateway Proxies and the Deployer
6. 6Chapter 5 — Traffic Management
7. 7Chapter 6 — Security and Authentication
8. 8Chapter 7 — The AI Gateway
9. 9Chapter 8 — Agentgateway and the Agentic Frontier
10. 10Chapter 9 — kgateway in Practice