Contour 1.12: Envoy-Powered Ingress Controller

Introduction

Ingress is the front door to your cluster — and also where small misconfigurations turn into large outages. Teams want something that’s Kubernetes-native, performs well under load, and can evolve with the direction the community is heading (toward Gateway-style APIs).

Contour 1.12, released on December 10, 2020, builds on Contour’s Envoy-powered approach with improvements around Gateway API alignment, performance, and security so edge routing stays predictable as traffic and complexity grow.

Where Contour fits

• A modern ingress/gateway layer for teams that want Envoy features without adopting a full service mesh.
• Kubernetes-first configuration using CRDs for routing, delegation, and TLS.
• Operations-friendly edge: strong observability and safe rollout behavior matter as much as raw throughput.

Gateway API Support

• Gateway API improvements provide better alignment with Kubernetes Gateway API standards.
• HTTPRoute enhancements enable more sophisticated routing rules and traffic management.
• TLSRoute support enables secure routing with automatic certificate management.
• BackendRef improvements provide better service and endpoint selection.

Performance Improvements

1. Envoy integration updates leverage latest Envoy performance improvements.
2. Connection handling optimizations reduce latency and improve throughput.
3. Resource usage improvements reduce CPU and memory footprint.
4. Scaling enhancements enable better handling of high-traffic scenarios.

Security Features

• TLS improvements provide better certificate management and rotation.
• mTLS support enables mutual TLS for service-to-service communication.
• Rate limiting enhancements provide more sophisticated throttling strategies.
• Web Application Firewall (WAF) integration improves protection against attacks.

Observability

• Metrics expansion exposes detailed ingress metrics for Prometheus.
• Distributed tracing support enables correlation of requests across services.
• Access logs improvements provide more detailed request/response information.
• Dashboard integration with Grafana provides visualization of ingress traffic.

Getting Started

kubectl apply -f https://projectcontour.io/quickstart/contour.yaml

Create an HTTPProxy:

apiVersion: projectcontour.io/v1
kind: HTTPProxy
metadata:
  name: my-app
spec:
  virtualhost:
    fqdn: my-app.example.com
  routes:
  - conditions:
    - prefix: /
    services:
    - name: my-app-service
      port: 80

Summary

Contour 1.12 continues to evolve as a leading ingress controller, providing teams with powerful edge routing capabilities backed by Envoy’s performance and features.