AWS recently shipped general availability support for Kubernetes Gateway API in its Load Balancer Controller. With this release, the company allows teams to manage Application Load Balancers and Network Load Balancers through the Gateway API specification, a Kubernetes SIG-maintained standard that’s been gaining traction as the successor to the aging Ingress API.
This matters because it dumps annotation challenges. Before the Gateway API, users configured load balancers by cramming JSON into Kubernetes annotations. No schema validation, no IDE support, just strings that could break at runtime. Now users get type-safe Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs) with proper validation and GitOps-friendly YAML.
The AWS Load Balancer Controller now handles both Layer 4 routes (TCP, UDP, TLS via Network Load Balancer) and Layer 7 routes (HTTP, gRPC via Application Load Balancer) using Gateway API resources. This completes AWS’s Gateway API coverage, as VPC Lattice already supported it…
