Kuadrant Joins CNCF to Unify API Gateways
Kuadrant, a project for multi-cluster application connectivity, has been accepted into the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). It combines Gateway API and Istio to provide a unified way to manage policies like TLS, auth, and rate limiting across hybrid Kubernetes deployments.
The Kuadrant project originated in early 2020 as an experiment to bring API management capabilities to Kubernetes. Its first components were `Limitador` for rate-limiting and `Authorino` for authentication and authorization, which formed the foundation for its security focus. Architecturally, Kuadrant separates its control plane and data plane. The control plane reconciles policies expressed as Kubernetes APIs, while the data plane components, `Limitador` and `Authorino`, integrate with the gateway provider to enforce those rules directly in the request flow. In 2022, the project's scope expanded to address multi-cluster topologies. This led to the creation of its core `DNSPolicy` and `TLSPolicy` APIs, which leverage the Policy Attachment mechanism from the official Gateway API project. For multi-cluster management, Kuadrant integrates with Open Cluster Management (OCM) to distribute gateway configurations from a central hub cluster to multiple spoke clusters. Acceptance into the CNCF Sandbox on June 19, 2024, marks the project's entry point into the foundation's ecosystem for early-stage projects. The team is now hardening its core capabilities in preparation for a v1 release slated for late 2024.
