Contour 1.27: Envoy Ingress Evolution and Gateway API

Introduction

Contour 1.27, released on June 28, 2024, advances Envoy-based ingress with enhanced Gateway API support, improved performance, better observability, and expanded routing capabilities. This release makes Contour more powerful and easier to use for modern Kubernetes ingress.

Gateway API Enhancements

• Extended Gateway API support provides more complete implementation of Gateway API standards.
• HTTPRoute improvements enable more sophisticated routing rules and traffic management.
• TLSRoute enhancements provide better secure routing with automatic certificate management.
• BackendRef improvements enable better service and endpoint selection.

Performance Improvements

1. Configuration processing optimizations reduce time to update Envoy configuration.
2. Resource usage improvements reduce CPU and memory consumption.
3. Connection handling enhancements improve throughput for high-traffic workloads.
4. Caching improvements reduce latency for frequently accessed routes.

Observability Enhancements

• Metrics expansion provides detailed metrics for traffic, errors, and performance.
• Access logs improvements provide more detailed request and response information.
• Distributed tracing support enables correlation of requests across services.
• Dashboard integration provides visualization of ingress traffic and health.

Routing Capabilities

• Advanced routing rules enable complex traffic splitting and header-based routing.
• Load balancing improvements provide better distribution algorithms and health checking.
• Circuit breaking enhancements improve resilience during service failures.
• Retry policies enable automatic request retries with configurable backoff strategies.

Getting Started

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

Create an HTTPProxy:

apiVersion: projectcontour.io/v1
kind: HTTPProxy
metadata:
  name: myapp
  namespace: default
spec:
  virtualhost:
    fqdn: myapp.example.com
    tls:
      secretName: myapp-tls
  routes:
  - conditions:
    - prefix: /
    services:
    - name: myapp
      port: 80

Summary

Contour 1.27 continues to evolve as a leading Envoy-based ingress controller, providing teams with powerful and efficient ingress capabilities.