Contour 1.28: Envoy Ingress Evolution and Advanced Gateway API

Introduction

Ingress controllers tend to earn their keep in the boring moments: safe config changes, predictable routing behavior, and observability you can trust when an incident hits. Gateway API is also raising the bar—teams want standards compliance without giving up the practical features they rely on.

Contour 1.28, released on July 10, 2025, builds on Envoy-based ingress with deeper Gateway API support, stronger configuration management, and better observability—aimed at production ingress setups where correctness and operability matter as much as raw throughput.

Why this matters in practice

• Gateway API standardization: easier to align teams on one API surface across clusters/environments.
• Safer change management: validation + rollback behavior reduces “bad route took down prod” moments.
• Better debugging: structured logs/metrics/tracing integration shortens time-to-root-cause for routing issues.

Gateway API Excellence

• Complete Gateway API v1 implementation provides production-ready support for all Gateway API resource types including Gateway, HTTPRoute, TLSRoute, and GRPCRoute.
• HTTPRoute enhancements enable sophisticated routing with advanced header matching, path rewriting, query parameter filtering, and request/response header manipulation.
• TLSRoute improvements provide seamless secure routing with automatic certificate management and SNI-based routing.
• BackendRef expansion enables fine-grained service selection with port selection, weight-based traffic splitting, and health check integration.

Envoy Configuration Management

1. Dynamic configuration improvements reduce time-to-update for Envoy configuration from seconds to milliseconds with optimized change propagation.
2. Configuration validation enhancements provide comprehensive validation before applying changes, preventing configuration errors and service disruptions.
3. Rollback capabilities enable automatic rollback of failed configurations with health check validation.
4. Configuration diff visualization helps operators understand configuration changes before applying them.

Observability Enhancements

• Metrics expansion provides detailed metrics for request rates, error rates, latency distributions, and connection statistics exported to Prometheus.
• Access logs improvements include structured logging with request/response details, timing information, and security event logging.
• Distributed tracing support enables correlation of ingress requests with backend service traces using OpenTelemetry integration.
• Dashboard integration provides real-time visualization of ingress traffic patterns, error rates, and performance metrics in Grafana.

Advanced Routing Capabilities

• Traffic splitting enables sophisticated canary deployments, blue-green rollouts, and percentage-based traffic distribution with automatic health checking.
• Header-based routing provides flexible request routing based on headers, cookies, and query parameters for A/B testing and feature flags.
• Circuit breaking enhancements improve resilience during backend failures with configurable failure thresholds and automatic recovery.
• Rate limiting improvements provide multiple rate limiting strategies including per-IP, per-header, and global rate limiting with redis-backed distributed rate limiting.

Performance & Reliability

1. Connection handling optimizations improve throughput by up to 40% for high-traffic workloads through better connection pooling and reuse.
2. Resource efficiency reduces memory footprint by 25% while handling larger numbers of routes and services.
3. Hot reload capabilities enable configuration updates without dropping connections or interrupting traffic.
4. Health checking improvements provide faster detection of backend failures with configurable check intervals and timeouts.

Getting Started

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

# Verify installation
kubectl get pods -n projectcontour-system

Create a Gateway with HTTPRoute:

apiVersion: gateway.networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: Gateway
metadata:
  name: contour-gateway
spec:
  gatewayClassName: contour
  listeners:
  - name: http
    protocol: HTTP
    port: 80
    allowedRoutes:
      namespaces:
        from: All
---
apiVersion: gateway.networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: HTTPRoute
metadata:
  name: webapp-route
spec:
  parentRefs:
  - name: contour-gateway
  hostnames:
  - "example.com"
  rules:
  - matches:
    - path:
        type: PathPrefix
        value: /api
    backendRefs:
    - name: api-service
      port: 8080
      weight: 100

Summary

Contour 1.28 continues to lead Envoy-based ingress solutions, providing teams with powerful, standards-compliant ingress control that scales from small clusters to enterprise deployments.