Beta Release: Gateway API Layer 7 (L7) Routing for AWS Load Balancer Controller #4236

[shuqz]

Beta Release: Gateway API Layer 7 (L7) Routing for AWS Load Balancer Controller

We are excited to announce the Beta release of Layer 7 (L7) routing support for the Kubernetes Gateway API within the AWS Load Balancer Controller (LBC)!🎉🎉🎉 This highly anticipated feature allows you to provision and manage AWS Application Load Balancers (ALBs) for HTTP, HTTPS, and GRPC traffic directly from your Kubernetes clusters using the extensible Gateway API.

This beta release focuses on Gateway API features with comprehensive status reporting, advanced authentication, and stability improvements. While we encourage you to test these features extensively in your development environments, please be aware that this is a Beta release and is not yet production-ready. We are actively gathering feedback to finalize stability for official production use. This Beta status applies only to the new Gateway API features. All existing controller functionality for standard Ingress, Service and TargetGroupBinding resources remains stable and is safe for production workflows. Please restrict use of the new Gateway API features to testing and development environments.

---

📚 Quick Links

v2.14.0 (requires Kubernetes 1.22+)
Documentation
Image: public.ecr.aws/eks/aws-load-balancer-controller:v2.14.0
Thanks to all our contributors!

---

🚀 What's New in Gateway API

Status Update & Observability

• Gateway Listener Status: Complete status reporting with all condition types (Conflicted, Accepted, ResolvedRefs, Programmed)
• Route Status Management: Fixed infinite reconcile loops, proper lifecycle management
• E2E Status Tests: Comprehensive validation for UDP, TCP, HTTP, gRPC route statuses
• Target Group Metrics: New aws_target_group_info metric for CloudWatch integration

Advanced Authentication

• OIDC Support: Complete OpenID Connect integration via ListenerRuleConfiguration
• Cognito Integration: Complete AWS Cognito integration via ListenerRuleConfiguration

Enhanced Routing

• gRPC Partially Supported: Complete gRPC routing with header/method matching, E2E tests
• Source IP Conditions: Advanced source IP matching in rules
• Multiple Header Values: Support comma-separated header values
• Hostname Uniqueness: Enforced between gRPC and HTTP routes

Traffic Management

• Target Group Stickiness: Session affinity support
• Fixed Response Actions: Custom status codes and response bodies
• Port-Specific Attributes: Different target group attributes per service port
• Weighted Target Group Fixes: Improved comparison logic

Infrastructure

• Gateway API Addons: WAFv2 and Shield support for Gateway API
• IPv6 Support: Complete IPv6 testing and validation
• Elastic IP Support: Frontend NLB Elastic IP allocation

---

🎯 Provide Your Feedback!

As this is a beta release, your feedback is invaluable! We encourage you to:

• Try it out in your development or staging environments.
• Share your experience by opening issues on our [GitHub repository] (https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/aws-load-balancer-controller/issues)
• Report any bugs you encounter.
• Suggest improvements or features you'd like to see.

Your active participation will help us refine this feature for its General Availability release.