The new Consul API Gateway is a dedicated ingress solution for intelligently routing traffic to applications running on the HashiCorp Consul service mesh, addressing the access pillar of service networking in the multi-cloud era. It provides consistency in handling inbound requests from external clients and offers features such as detecting external client traffic, controlling the point of entry, simplifying traffic patterns, and identifying key metadata for routing. The gateway can be installed on a Kubernetes cluster, deployed using a YAML file, and configured to modify HTTP headers and split traffic between services based on weighted ratios. It will support only Kubernetes environments at launch but plans to extend capabilities to other Consul service mesh running environments in the future.