Argo Rollouts Gateway API plugin

Argo Rollouts is a progressive delivery controller for Kubernetes. It supports several advanced deployment methods such as blue/green and canaries. For canary deployments Argo Rollouts can optionally use a traffic provider to split traffic between pods with full control and in a gradual way.

Until recently adding a new traffic provider to Argo Rollouts needed ad-hoc support code. With the adoption of the Gateway API, the integration becomes much easier as any traffic provider that implements the API will automatically be supported by Argo Rollouts.

The Kubernetes Gateway API

The Gateway API is an open source project managed by the SIG-NETWORK community. It is a collection of resources that model service networking in Kubernetes.

See a list of current projects that support the API.

Prerequisites

You need the following

A Kubernetes cluster
An installation of the Argo Rollouts controller
A traffic provider that supports the Gateway API
An installation of the Gateway plugin

Once everything is ready you need to create a Rollout resource for all workloads that will use the integration.

How to integrate Gateway API with Argo Rollouts

This is the installation process.

Enable Gateway Provider and create Gateway entrypoint
Create GatewayClass and Gateway resources
Create cluster entrypoint and map it with our Gateway entrypoint
Install Argo Rollouts in your cluster along with the Gateway API plugin
Create HTTPRoute
Create canary and stable services
Create argo-rollouts resources
Start a deployment

The first 3 steps are specific to your provider/implementation of the Gateway API inside the Kubernetes cluster. The rest of the steps are the same regardless of the specific implementation you chose.

See end-to-end examples for:

Note that these examples are included just for illustration purposes. You should be able to use any solution that implements the Gateway API.

Installing the plugin

There are many ways to install the Gateway API plugin in Argo Rollouts. The easiest one is to simply download it during startup.

apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
  name: argo-rollouts-config # must be so name
  namespace: argo-rollouts # must be in this namespace
data:
  trafficRouterPlugins: |-
    - name: "argoproj-labs/gatewayAPI"
      location: "https://github.com/argoproj-labs/rollouts-plugin-trafficrouter-gatewayapi/releases/download/v0.0.0-rc1/gateway-api-plugin-linux-amd64"

Deploy this file with kubectl or Argo CD or any other deployment method you use for your cluster.

Restart the Argo Rollouts pod for the plug-in to take effect.

kubectl rollout restart deployment -n argo-rollouts argo-rollouts

For more details see the Plugin documentation at Argo Rollouts.

Feedback needed

The gateway API plugin should cover all providers that support it. If you find an issue please tell us about it

If you also want to add an example with your favorite gateway API provider please send us a Pull Request.