Feature maturity
Review the feature maturity of the kgateway project.
To receive feedback and improve functionality for real use cases, kgateway features are often released according to a feature maturity model. As the features are improved and stabilized, they are gradually moved through the stages of alpha, beta, and general availability (GA) support.
Maturity stages
Review the following table for the comparison points between each stage of maturity.
| Comparison point | Alpha | Beta | GA |
|---|---|---|---|
| API | Can and will likely change | Unlikely to change | No change |
| Implementation | Can and will likely change | Can change, but user experience is maintained | No changes that affect user experience |
| Upgrade paths | Not guaranteed | Not guaranteed | Provided and tested |
| Requests for enhancement (RFEs) and bug fixes | RFEs and bug fixes prioritized | RFEs and bug fixes prioritized | Fully supported |
| Documentation | Not guaranteed and supplied with warnings | Supplied with warnings | Fully supplied |
| Automated testing | Internal testing, but little testing with real use cases | Internal testing and some testing with real use cases | Fully tested and validated with real use cases |
| Suggested usage | Exploration and feedback | Testing setups, demos, and POCs | Production setups |
Feature maturity
Review the following table for the maturity of features in the kgateway project.
| Feature | Maturity |
|---|---|
| Core functionality, such as controller and data plane proxy | GA |
| Support for Gateway API | GA* |
| GatewayParameters | GA |
| Self-managed proxies | Alpha |
| Backend and BackendConfigPolicy | GA |
| Hierarchical policy attachment, including inheritance | GA |
| Access logging | GA |
| Rate limiting GatewayExtension | GA |
| External auth GatewayExtension | GA |
| External processing (ExtProc) GatewayExtension | GA |
| JWT GatewayExtension | Beta |
| OAuth2 provider GatewayExtension | GA |
| OpenTelemetry integration | GA |
| AWS Lambda integration | GA |
| Istio ambient and sidecar integration | GA |
| AI Gateway integration | N/A (see agentgateway) |
| Inference Extension integration | N/A (see agentgateway) |
* For more details about Gateway API support, see the Kubernetes Gateway API docs.
Experimental features in Gateway API
The following features are experimental in the upstream Kubernetes Gateway API project, and are subject to change.
| Feature | Minimum Gateway API version |
|---|---|
| ListenerSets | 1.3 |
| TCPRoutes | 1.3 |
| BackendTLSPolicy | 1.4 |
| CORS policies | 1.2 |
| Retries | 1.2 |
| Session persistence | 1.3 |
| HTTPRoute rule attachment option | 1.3 |
Experimental feature gate: To use experimental Gateway API features in kgateway version 2.2 or later, you must enable the KGW_ENABLE_GATEWAY_API_EXPERIMENTAL_FEATURES environment variable in your kgateway controller deployment. This setting defaults to false and must be explicitly enabled. For example, you might upgrade your installation with the following Helm value:
controller:
extraEnv:
KGW_ENABLE_GATEWAY_API_EXPERIMENTAL_FEATURES: "true"Sample command for version 1.4.0: Note that some CRDs are prefixed with X to indicate that the entire CRD is experimental and subject to change.
kubectl apply -f https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/gateway-api/releases/download/v1.4.0/experimental-install.yaml