kgateway: The Cloud-Native API and AI Gateway
Shriira Press
An Envoy-powered, Kubernetes-native API gateway that turns the Gateway API into real traffic routing — and extends it to secure modern AI workloads.
Welcome to kgateway: The Cloud-Native API and AI Gateway.
kgateway is a Kubernetes-native API gateway built on the Envoy proxy and the Kubernetes Gateway API. It began life in 2018 as Gloo, served thousands of production environments, and was donated by Solo.io to the CNCF in 2025, where it became a sandbox project. Its job is to be the front door to your services: it receives traffic from outside the cluster and routes it to the right backend, applying traffic management, security, and resilience policies along the way — and, increasingly, governing traffic to large language models and AI agents. This book builds your understanding from the ground up. It opens with the API gateway problem and what kgateway is, then explains the Gateway API standard it implements, the control-plane and data-plane architecture that translates your intent into live Envoy configuration, and the gateway proxies it deploys for you. From there it works through traffic management, security and authentication, and the AI gateway features that make kgateway distinctive, before closing with how to run it in practice and where it sits in the cloud-native ecosystem.
This title is part of the ShriIra library and is free to read in full, right here — our small contribution to making world-class knowledge easy to reach.
A note on reading it: open the Contents menu at the top of the reader to jump between chapters, use the Aa menu to set a comfortable text size, theme (light, sepia, or night), and single- or two-page layout. Your place is saved automatically, so you can always pick up where you left off.
We hope it serves you well.
— Shriira Press