Kuadrant: Policy-Driven API Gateways for Kubernetes
Shriira Press
Turn the Kubernetes Gateway API into a policy-driven platform for connectivity, security, and traffic control — across one cluster or many.
Welcome to Kuadrant: Policy-Driven API Gateways for Kubernetes.
Kuadrant is a CNCF sandbox project that extends the Kubernetes Gateway API into a complete connectivity, security, and policy framework for API gateways. Rather than asking teams to hand-configure Envoy filters or stitch together rate limiters, auth servers, DNS records, and TLS certificates by hand, Kuadrant exposes those concerns as Kubernetes custom resources — RateLimitPolicy, AuthPolicy, DNSPolicy, and TLSPolicy — that attach declaratively to Gateways and HTTPRoutes. Underneath, the Rust-based Limitador enforces rate limits and Authorino acts as an external authorization server, both wired into Istio or Envoy Gateway through a WebAssembly shim. This book starts with the problem Kuadrant solves and the Gateway API foundation it builds on, then walks through its control-plane and data-plane architecture, each of the four policies in turn, the defaults-and-overrides model that lets platform teams and developers share a gateway safely, the multi-cluster topology with global rate limiting and DNS-based load balancing, observability, and finally how to adopt it in practice. By the end you will understand not just what each knob does but why Kuadrant is shaped the way it is.
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