Automating Kubernetes Ingress Management with the Kong Gateway Operator

In the growing landscape of Kubernetes, managing ingress access to your applications and APIs not only requires precision but also demands an alert team dedicated to managing the configuration and lifecycle of the ingress gateways over time. This time-consuming work includes safely rolling out new versions of your gateways but also identifying problems during runtime, scaling gateways and applications up and down for changes in traffic, and generally ensuring that your fleet of Gateways is reliable and up-to-date.

At Kong we're taking our extensive expertise in managing high-performance and highly-available Gateways in production and packaged that as a Kubernetes operator: The Kong Gateway Operator (KGO). Kubernetes users can leverage our new Kong Gateway Operator to quickly and effortlessly deploy and manage any number of gateways onto their clusters, including lifecycle management features such as configuration management, automated upgrades, and auto-scaling.

In this talk we'll demonstrate how you can deploy the open-source Kong Gateway Operator yourself today and start utilizing it to manage your gateways. We'll provide a brief review of the history of the project including its roots in Kubernetes' Gateway API, and we'll show you how to deploy multiple gateways in your cluster and safely perform automated canary or blue/green rollouts to newer versions. We'll also demonstrate auto-scaling to react to changes in traffic, and even show you some of our new features on the horizon such as our AI Gateway for managing access to AI models such as Large Language Models
(LLM).