Gloo Gateway
Envoy-based Kubernetes-native API gateway, now AI-native with a dual data plane.
About
Gloo Gateway is Solo.io's Kubernetes-native API gateway built on Envoy, programmable through the Kubernetes Gateway API. It handles ingress, east-west, and egress traffic with function-level routing, authentication, rate limiting, and observability, and the October 2026 Gloo Gateway 2.0 release lets one control plane delegate traffic to Envoy for traditional APIs or to agentgateway (a Rust data plane) for LLM and agentic traffic such as MCP and A2A.
Launched as Gloo in 2018 and production-ready since 2019, Solo.io donated the open-source core to the CNCF as kgateway (Apache 2.0), which now carries the community development; Gloo Gateway is the commercial distribution with enterprise support and a management UI. It is a strong pick for Kubernetes teams that want Envoy's power expressed as Kubernetes resources, and for teams planning ambient-mesh or AI-agent connectivity. Commercial pricing is custom and sales-led; the OSS kgateway is free.
What it can do
- Envoy data plane programmed via Kubernetes Gateway API
- Dual data plane: Envoy plus Rust-based agentgateway
- Function-level routing and traffic policies
- AI connectivity: LLM routing, MCP, and A2A support
- Auth, rate limiting, WAF, and transformation policies
- Single pane of glass with Gloo Mesh management UI
Setup
Install via Helm with the Gloo Gateway chart or the kgateway open-source chart; define Gateway and HTTPRoute resources to start routing.
Prerequisites
Kubernetes cluster; Helm.
Use cases
Works with
Trust score — 8/10
Scored 8/10 (verified tier, metrics-v1). Evidence: Gloo-to-kgateway lineage and 2.0 dual-dataplane announcement documented by Solo.io; star count read from the kgateway repo. Strengths: mature Envoy gateway with CNCF OSS core, Gateway API-native, credible AI-dataplane story. Docked for: (1) commercial pricing is opaque and sales-led; (2) the 2.0 architecture split (Envoy vs agentgateway) is new and its operational story is unproven at scale; (3) stars reflect the OSS kgateway, not the commercial product. License: Apache-2.0 (OSS core); proprietary commercial distribution.
★ 5,711 GitHub stars
How the trust score is built
Full methodology →- Adoption · stars/downloads, log-scaled vs peers
- 7.0/10
- Maintenance · recency, releases, issue load
- 9.0/10
- Openness · license + docs
- 8.0/10
- Manual review · sanity read + red-flag check
- 8.0/10
- · Launched 2018 as Gloo (Solo.io), production-ready 2019; OSS donated to CNCF as kgateway
- · 5,711 GitHub stars on kgateway-dev/kgateway (verified via GitHub API)
- · Gloo Gateway 2.0 (Oct 2026): dual dataplane Envoy + Rust agentgateway for AI traffic
- · manual review: 2.0 architecture split is new and unproven at scale; commercial pricing opaque
Sources
Every fact above was checked against these sources. Where a claim comes from the provider and couldn't be independently verified, the text says so.