Public beta of free open-source gateway provides unified, high-performance, Kubernetes-native routing for both Gateway API and Ingress
HAProxy Technologies, the company behind HAProxy One, the world’s fastest application delivery and security platform, announced HAProxy Unified Gateway, a free, open-source product that unifies Kubernetes traffic management across both the modern Gateway API and legacy Ingress standards. This new gateway addresses modern cloud-native requirements and provides organizations a low-risk, gradual migration path, eliminating the need to manage separate products from different vendors.
The announcement of the public beta was made at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2025, where the company is a Diamond sponsor.
“HAProxy Unified Gateway is a great solution for open-source users who need a flexible, performant, and reliable way to route external traffic to Kubernetes applications – especially if they want to migrate smoothly from existing Ingress deployments to the newer Gateway API,” said Dujko Radovnikovic, CEO, HAProxy Technologies. “When you also consider our enterprise solutions for external load balancing, multi-cluster routing, and the groundbreaking universal mesh, the HAProxy One platform gives Kubernetes users the power to solve practically any traffic problem.”
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A unified solution for evolving Kubernetes networking
As businesses migrate more complex, mission-critical workloads to Kubernetes, they require traffic management solutions that support diverse protocols and sophisticated organizational architectures.
For years, the Kubernetes Ingress standard has served a foundational role but is fundamentally ill-suited to the demands of today’s complex, high-scale environments. Key limitations include:
- Protocol Constraints: Ingress typically lacks flexible protocol support, restricting traffic to HTTP/S and limiting the types of applications that can be managed.
- Operational Risk: The standard’s single-object configuration lacks robust role-based access control (RBAC), forcing organizations to create operational bottlenecks or risk errors from multiple teams modifying the same resource.
The Kubernetes Gateway API standard was created to resolve these architectural and operational deficits. HAProxy Unified Gateway is engineered to help organizations leverage Gateway API immediately while providing unified support for existing Ingress deployments.
Key features of HAProxy Unified Gateway
The HAProxy Unified Gateway beta delivers the features required for modern cloud-native ecosystems:
- Flexible Protocol Support: The beta launches with crucial support for TCP and HTTP/S (including TLS termination), empowering teams to quickly onboard a wider variety of application workloads, including legacy and Layer 4 applications. Future releases will add support for more protocols.
- Role-Based Access Control: By implementing the Gateway API’s role-oriented design, the gateway enables a clear separation of concerns among Cluster Operators, Infrastructure Providers, and Application Developers. This allows teams to safely share network infrastructure and manage their own routing rules autonomously.
- Low-Risk Migration: The gateway is designed to provide unified support for both Ingress and Gateway API standards in a single instance (coming in 2026). This will provide a low-risk, gradual migration path with consistent management.
Performance and battle-tested reliability
HAProxy Unified Gateway is built on the proven HAProxy core, widely recognized as the world’s fastest software load balancer. This foundation provides industry-leading throughput, low latency, and resource efficiency.
This performance is proven at scale: the HAProxy core can reach over 2 million HTTPS requests per second on a single AWS Graviton2 instance and is used by some of the world’s biggest platforms to handle hundreds of billions of requests a day. This efficiency translates directly into resource savings and reduces the total cost of ownership for cloud infrastructure.
The gateway’s reliability is underwritten by over 20 years of continuous development and production use in the HAProxy open-source core, which is trusted by large enterprises and public sector organizations.
Upgrade path to enterprise-scale management and security
HAProxy Unified Gateway will always remain a free, open-source product dedicated to the Kubernetes community.
For organizations whose requirements extend beyond a single cluster, an enterprise implementation will be integrated into the HAProxy One platform in 2026. This provides a seamless upgrade path for users who need centralized, global capabilities, including:
- Universal traffic management for north-south and east-west traffic across multiple Kubernetes clusters, on-premises, and multi-cloud environments.
- Intelligent multi-layered security, including DDoS protection, bot management, global rate limiting, and web application firewall (WAF).
- A centralized control plane (HAProxy Fusion) for unified management, observability, and automation at massive scale.
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