NGINX Gateway Fabric 1.3.0: Simplifying Kubernetes App Connectivity with a Unified Application Delivery Fabric

We're excited to announce the release of NGINX Gateway Fabric 1.3.0, a groundbreaking product that evolves application connectivity in the Kubernetes ecosystem. NGINX Gateway Fabric pioneers a new category of Kubernetes tools - a unified application delivery fabric designed to streamline and simplify app, service, and API connectivity. The tool is architected to enable app and service connectivity to, from, and within Kubernetes clusters, effectively combining the most popular Ingress controller and service mesh use cases in one unified tool, while reducing complexity, improving availability, and providing security and visibility at scale. With this release, we're also transitioning from an open-source model to a fully-supported commercial version, which will be included in our connectivity for Kubernetes stack bundle.

NGINX Gateway Fabric 1.3.0 introduces a range of powerful features designed to optimize application performance and provide deep insights into system behavior:

Key features of NGINX Gateway Fabric 1.3.0 include:

1. GRPCRoute support: Enables efficient and low-latency gRPC communication for applications, allowing seamless management of gRPC traffic alongside traditional HTTP REST APIs.

2. OpenTelemetry tracing: Provides built-in tracing support for enhanced visibility into application performance. Allows easy configuration and enablement of tracing for specific routes, facilitating the collection of valuable insights without overwhelming the system.

3. Client Settings Policy: Offers fine-grained control over NGINX behavior with user-friendly policies for client settings such as body size limits, timeouts, and keepalive settings. Enables setting appropriate defaults at the Gateway level while allowing route-level overrides for application-specific needs.

By integrating NGINX’s proven data plane into the Gateway API framework, NGINX Gateway Fabric ensures fast, reliable, and secure Kubernetes app and service connectivity. To learn more about the features and benefits of NGINX Gateway Fabric 1.3.0, read the technical release blog on F5 DevCentral.