The Kubernetes Gateway API has definitively established itself in 2026 as the successor to the traditional Ingress resource type. With version 1.6, the GA release by AWS for the Load Balancer Controller, and a growing number of conformant implementations, the time for migrating from Ingress has come. The switch promises not only better type safety and clearer role separation, but above all portable routing definitions that work equally well between cloud providers and self-managed clusters.

TCPRoute and UDPRoute in the Standard Channel

With Gateway API v1.6.0 (Released on June 30, 2026), TCPRoute and UDPRoute have made the jump to the Standard Channel and are now available as stable v1 API resources. This closes one of the biggest gaps in the previous Ingress model: while HTTP and TLS traffic could already be mapped portably since v1.0, raw TCP/UDP workloads like databases, DNS, VoIP, or IoT telemetry had to resort to implementation-specific CRDs or classic Kubernetes Services.…