Has Anyone Successfully Used Gateway API with Kong in Production?

I tried the open-source version of Kong but ended up switching to the NGINX Gateway Fabric. The main reasons were the removal of open-source support from Kong and the fact that most plugins required a database like Postgres to function. NGINX is working great for our current needs.

My team just signed up for Kong and is starting with the API Gateway. It's frustrating how we've gone through multiple vendors for Gateway API capabilities, yet we're still tempted to create some complicated in-house solution with Istio.

We used Kong for external requests, forwarding to web servers or Istio in Kubernetes. Recently, we switched to HAProxy because, honestly, Kong's costs were just too high.

We're still using GKE Multi-Cluster Ingress since Google hasn't supported Cloud CDN for the Gateway yet. This has been a known issue for years now, with delivery pushed back to H1 2026.

I haven't used it myself because Kong functions mainly as an API Gateway, which can be a bit confusing since it's not directly a Gateway API. Sure, Kong Ingress can read HTTPRoutes, but the Kubernetes documentation doesn't currently recognize it as fully compliant with the Gateway API implementations. Just a heads up, conformant controllers need to stick to the Kubernetes CRDs, so you'd have the standard options like TLS termination and redirects available.

I have most of it working except for the TLS and TCP routes. Unfortunately, the operator isn't ready yet, so I'm relying on the helm chart for setup.

We're in the process of moving away from the Kong Ingress controller to use Konnect instead. It's been a bit of a switch, but we believe it will better suit our needs in the long run.