"Kubernetes Gateway API: Next-Gen Traffic Management Beyond Ingress"
Kubernetes traffic management has outgrown the Ingress era: today's clusters need explicit ownership boundaries, safer multi-team workflows, and routing semantics you can reason about under change. This book is written for experienced Kubernetes platform and networking engineers who already operate production clusters and want a clearer, more portable way to model north-south and edge traffic than annotation-driven controller folklore.
You'll build a first-principles mental model of how controllers actually program Services, EndpointSlices, and load balancers, then step into the Gateway API's role-separated architecture: GatewayClass, Gateway, Routes, and attachable Policies. Deep dives cover listener constraints and multi-tenant attachment rules, cross-namespace security with ReferenceGrant, and HTTPRoute as a precise L7 language for deterministic matching, traffic splitting, and progressive delivery. Beyond HTTP, you'll learn decision criteria for gRPC/TCP/TLS/UDP routing and how to choose between TLS termination and passthrough with operable certificate rotation patterns.
Operationally, the book emphasizes status-driven troubleshooting, a repeatable triage playbook from attachment to backend health, and gateway-layer observability for attribution and rollout validation. It also provides a pragmatic migration path from Ingress—inventory, translation, and phased cutovers—grounded in conformance and compatibility realities across implementations.
