Gateway API v1.3.0: Advancements in Request Mirroring, CORS, Gateway Merging, and Retry Budgets

By Candace Holman (Red Hat) |

Gateway API logo

Join us in the Kubernetes SIG Network community in celebrating the general availability of Gateway API v1.3.0! We are also pleased to announce that there are already a number of conformant implementations to try, made possible by postponing this blog announcement. Version 1.3.0 of the API was released about a month ago on April 24, 2025.

Gateway API v1.3.0 brings a new feature to the Standard channel (Gateway API's GA release channel): percentage-based request mirroring, and introduces three new experimental features: cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) filters, a standardized mechanism for listener and gateway merging, and retry budgets.

Also see the full release notes and applaud the v1.3.0 release team next time you see them.

Graduation to Standard channel

Graduation to the Standard channel is a notable achievement for Gateway API features, as inclusion in the Standard release channel denotes a high level of confidence in the API surface and provides guarantees of backward compatibility. Of course, as with any other Kubernetes API, Standard channel features can continue to evolve with backward-compatible additions over time, and we (SIG Network) certainly expect further refinements and improvements in the future. For more information on how all of this works, refer to the Gateway API Versioning Policy.

Percentage-based request mirroring

Leads: Lior Lieberman,Jake Bennert

GEP-3171: Percentage-Based Request Mirroring

Percentage-based request mirroring is an enhancement to the existing support for HTTP request mirroring, which allows HTTP requests to be duplicated to another backend using the RequestMirror filter type. Request mirroring is particularly useful in blue-green deployment. It can be used to assess the impact of request scaling on application performance without impacting responses to clients.

The previous mirroring capability worked on all the requests to a backendRef.
Percentage-based request mirroring allows users to specify a subset of requests they want to be mirrored, either by percentage or fraction. This can be particularly useful when services are receiving a large volume of requests. Instead of mirroring all of those requests, this new feature can be used to mirror a smaller subset of them.

Here's an example with 42% of the requests to "foo-v1" being mirrored to "foo-v2":

apiVersion: gateway.networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: HTTPRoute
metadata:
  name: http-filter-mirror
  labels:
    gateway: mirror-gateway
spec:
  parentRefs:
  - name: mirror-gateway
  hostnames:
  - mirror.example
  rules:
  - backendRefs:
    - name: foo-v1
      port: 8080
    filters:
    - type: RequestMirror
      requestMirror:
        backendRef:
          name: foo-v2
          port: 8080
        percent: 42 # This value must be an integer.

You can also configure the partial mirroring using a fraction. Here is an example with 5 out of every 1000 requests to "foo-v1" being mirrored to "foo-v2".

  rules:
  - backendRefs:
    - name: foo-v1
      port: 8080
    filters:
    - type: RequestMirror
      requestMirror:
        backendRef:
          name: foo-v2
          port: 8080
        fraction:
          numerator: 5
          denominator: 1000

Additions to Experimental channel

The Experimental channel is Gateway API's channel for experimenting with new features and gaining confidence with them before allowing them to graduate to standard. Please note: the experimental channel may include features that are changed or removed later.

Starting in release v1.3.0, in an effort to distinguish Experimental channel resources from Standard channel resources, any new experimental API kinds have the prefix "X". For the same reason, experimental resources are now added to the API group gateway.networking.x-k8s.io instead of gateway.networking.k8s.io. Bear in mind that using new experimental channel resources means they can coexist with standard channel resources, but migrating these resources to the standard channel will require recreating them with the standard channel names and API group (both of which lack the "x-k8s" designator or "X" prefix).

The v1.3 release introduces two new experimental API kinds: XBackendTrafficPolicy and XListenerSet. To be able to use experimental API kinds, you need to install the Experimental channel Gateway API YAMLs from the locations listed below.

CORS filtering

Leads: Liang Li, Eyal Pazz, Rob Scott

GEP-1767: CORS Filter

Cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) is an HTTP-header based mechanism that allows a web page to access restricted resources from a server on an origin (domain, scheme, or port) different from the domain that served the web page. This feature adds a new HTTPRoute filter type, called "CORS", to configure the handling of cross-origin requests before the response is sent back to the client.

To be able to use experimental CORS filtering, you need to install the Experimental channel Gateway API HTTPRoute yaml.

Here's an example of a simple cross-origin configuration:

apiVersion: gateway.networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: HTTPRoute
metadata:
  name: http-route-cors
spec:
  parentRefs:
  - name: http-gateway
  rules:
  - matches:
    - path:
        type: PathPrefix
        value: /resource/foo
    filters:
    - cors:
      - type: CORS
        allowOrigins:
        - *
        allowMethods: 
        - GET
        - HEAD
        - POST
        allowHeaders: 
        - Accept
        - Accept-Language
        - Content-Language
        - Content-Type
        - Range
    backendRefs:
    - kind: Service
      name: http-route-cors
      port: 80

In this case, the Gateway returns an origin header of "*", which means that the requested resource can be referenced from any origin, a methods header (Access-Control-Allow-Methods) that permits the GET, HEAD, and POST verbs, and a headers header allowing Accept, Accept-Language, Content-Language, Content-Type, and Range.

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
Access-Control-Allow-Methods: GET, HEAD, POST
Access-Control-Allow-Headers: Accept,Accept-Language,Content-Language,Content-Type,Range

The complete list of fields in the new CORS filter:

  • allowOrigins
  • allowMethods
  • allowHeaders
  • allowCredentials
  • exposeHeaders
  • maxAge

See CORS protocol for details.

XListenerSets (standardized mechanism for Listener and Gateway merging)

Lead: Dave Protasowski

GEP-1713: ListenerSets - Standard Mechanism to Merge Multiple Gateways

This release adds a new experimental API kind, XListenerSet, that allows a shared list of listeners to be attached to one or more parent Gateway(s). In addition, it expands upon the existing suggestion that Gateway API implementations may merge configuration from multiple Gateway objects. It also:

  • adds a new field allowedListeners to the .spec of a Gateway. The allowedListeners field defines from which Namespaces to select XListenerSets that are allowed to attach to that Gateway: Same, All, None, or Selector based.
  • increases the previous maximum number (64) of listeners with the addition of XListenerSets.
  • allows the delegation of listener configuration, such as TLS, to applications in other namespaces.

To be able to use experimental XListenerSet, you need to install the Experimental channel Gateway API XListenerSet yaml.

The following example shows a Gateway with an HTTP listener and two child HTTPS XListenerSets with unique hostnames and certificates. The combined set of listeners attached to the Gateway includes the two additional HTTPS listeners in the XListenerSets that attach to the Gateway. This example illustrates the delegation of listener TLS config to application owners in different namespaces ("store" and "app"). The HTTPRoute has both the Gateway listener named "foo" and one XListenerSet listener named "second" as parentRefs.

apiVersion: gateway.networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: Gateway
metadata:
  name: prod-external
  namespace: infra
spec:
  gatewayClassName: example
  allowedListeners:
  - from: All
  listeners:
  - name: foo
    hostname: foo.com
    protocol: HTTP
    port: 80
---
apiVersion: gateway.networking.x-k8s.io/v1alpha1
kind: XListenerSet
metadata:
  name: store
  namespace: store
spec:
  parentRef:
    name: prod-external
  listeners:
  - name: first
    hostname: first.foo.com
    protocol: HTTPS
    port: 443
    tls:
      mode: Terminate
      certificateRefs:
      - kind: Secret
        group: ""
        name: first-workload-cert
---
apiVersion: gateway.networking.x-k8s.io/v1alpha1
kind: XListenerSet
metadata:
  name: app
  namespace: app
spec:
  parentRef:
    name: prod-external
  listeners:
  - name: second
    hostname: second.foo.com
    protocol: HTTPS
    port: 443
    tls:
      mode: Terminate
      certificateRefs:
      - kind: Secret
        group: ""
        name: second-workload-cert
---
apiVersion: gateway.networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: HTTPRoute
metadata:
  name: httproute-example
spec:
  parentRefs:
  - name: app
    kind: XListenerSet
    sectionName: second
  - name: parent-gateway
    kind: Gateway
    sectionName: foo
    ...

Each listener in a Gateway must have a unique combination of port, protocol, (and hostname if supported by the protocol) in order for all listeners to be compatible and not conflicted over which traffic they should receive.

Furthermore, implementations can merge separate Gateways into a single set of listener addresses if all listeners across those Gateways are compatible. The management of merged listeners was under-specified in releases prior to v1.3.0.

With the new feature, the specification on merging is expanded. Implementations must treat the parent Gateways as having the merged list of all listeners from itself and from attached XListenerSets, and validation of this list of listeners must behave the same as if the list were part of a single Gateway. Within a single Gateway, listeners are ordered using the following precedence:

  1. Single Listeners (not a part of an XListenerSet) first,
  2. Remaining listeners ordered by:
    • object creation time (oldest first), and if two listeners are defined in objects that have the same timestamp, then
    • alphabetically based on "{namespace}/{name of listener}"

Retry budgets (XBackendTrafficPolicy)

Leads: Eric Bishop, Mike Morris

GEP-3388: Retry Budgets

This feature allows you to configure a retry budget across all endpoints of a destination Service. This is used to limit additional client-side retries after reaching a configured threshold. When configuring the budget, the maximum percentage of active requests that may consist of retries may be specified, as well as the interval over which requests will be considered when calculating the threshold for retries. The development of this specification changed the existing experimental API kind BackendLBPolicy into a new experimental API kind, XBackendTrafficPolicy, in the interest of reducing the proliferation of policy resources that had commonalities.

To be able to use experimental retry budgets, you need to install the Experimental channel Gateway API XBackendTrafficPolicy yaml.

The following example shows an XBackendTrafficPolicy that applies a retryConstraint that represents a budget that limits the retries to a maximum of 20% of requests, over a duration of 10 seconds, and to a minimum of 3 retries over 1 second.

apiVersion: gateway.networking.x-k8s.io/v1alpha1
kind: XBackendTrafficPolicy
metadata:
  name: traffic-policy-example
spec:
  retryConstraint:
    budget: 
        percent: 20
        interval: 10s
    minRetryRate:
      count: 3
      interval: 1s
    ...

Try it out

Unlike other Kubernetes APIs, you don't need to upgrade to the latest version of Kubernetes to get the latest version of Gateway API. As long as you're running Kubernetes 1.26 or later, you'll be able to get up and running with this version of Gateway API.

To try out the API, follow the Getting Started Guide. As of this writing, four implementations are already conformant with Gateway API v1.3 experimental channel features. In alphabetical order:

Get involved

Wondering when a feature will be added? There are lots of opportunities to get involved and help define the future of Kubernetes routing APIs for both ingress and service mesh.

The maintainers would like to thank everyone who's contributed to Gateway API, whether in the form of commits to the repo, discussion, ideas, or general support. We could never have made this kind of progress without the support of this dedicated and active community.