API gateway architectures for Kubernetes

API gateways are integral to managing network traffic security and centralizing management, particularly within Kubernetes environments, offering various deployment options such as hardware appliances, virtual machines, or SaaS. The shared gateway model involves a centralized gateway serving multiple services across different namespaces, allowing for streamlined API management and tailored API products. Alternatively, the gateway per service approach addresses specific workload needs by dedicating clusters of gateways to individual services, enhancing scalability and security. Gateway sharding further optimizes API management by deploying gateway clusters in different network zones, allowing selective API access. The Kubernetes Gateway API introduces a role-oriented, protocol-aware configuration mechanism, enhancing the traditional Ingress API with more expressive, strongly typed Kubernetes resources such as GatewayClass, Gateway, and HTTPRoute, catering to diverse user roles from infrastructure providers to app developers. Tyk integrates with Kubernetes to facilitate API management practices, supporting various deployment patterns and enabling declarative API system descriptions through its Kubernetes Operator.