DigitalOcean has announced the integration of the Kubernetes Gateway API as a managed service within all DigitalOcean Kubernetes (DOKS) clusters, available at no additional cost. This update aims to enhance traffic management by providing a more expressive, extensible, and powerful alternative to the traditional Ingress API, addressing its limitations in flexibility and routing capabilities. Powered by Cilium's high-performance eBPF implementation, the Gateway API offers advanced features such as header-based routing, traffic splitting, and canary deployments, alongside superior performance and seamless integration with DigitalOcean Network Load Balancers. The Gateway API introduces a role-oriented resource model that distinctly separates infrastructure concerns from application routing, allowing cluster operators and application developers to manage resources without overlap. This update promises lower latency, higher throughput, reduced CPU usage, and minimal memory footprint, as traffic is processed directly in the Linux kernel, bypassing traditional proxy-based solutions.