A10 Thunder Kubernetes Connector vs agentgateway
A10 Thunder Kubernetes Connector
documentation.a10networks.com
agentgateway
agentgateway.devSide by side
| Figure | A10 Thunder Kubernetes Connector | agentgateway |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | — | Free |
| Free plan | — | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | Yes |
| Web | — | Yes |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | — | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 0 | 1 |
| Spec score · Kubernetes Ingress Controllers | 7.7 (#11) | 9.1 (#1) |
| Integrations | A10 says the solution supports automation tools such as Terraform and Ansible for integration into CI/CD pipelines. | Official integration categories cover identity providers, AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, LLM providers, MCP, networking tools, agent frameworks and NetBird. |
| Intended users | A10 describes its application and network solutions as serving large enterprises, service providers, and cloud platforms. | The site invites tool-builders, platform engineers, and AI enthusiasts to join the community and describes the controls as suited to platform teams. |
| Purpose | Thunder Kubernetes Connector (TKC) helps provide external access to applications running in a Kubernetes cluster with Thunder ADC. | Agentgateway is an open-source HTTP and gRPC gateway for routing, securing, observing, and governing service, LLM, MCP, and agent-to-agent traffic. |
| Support | A10 provides product technical support and says its Technical Assistance Center uses a follow-the-sun support model to address issues at any time of day. | The enterprise page lists partner-provided commercial support, including a Solo.io offer with 24×7 coverage, upstream collaboration, and best-practice guidance. |
Plans
In their own words
A10 Thunder Kubernetes Connector
A10 Thunder Kubernetes Connector (TKC) monitors Kubernetes application lifecycles and updates an external Thunder ADC load balancer to route traffic. Running inside a Kubernetes cluster, it identifies a web service’s NodePort and dynamically configures Thunder ADC to load-balance traffic to Kubernetes nodes, avoiding manual network-resource provisioning. A10 describes TKC for multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud deployments, where Thunder ADC can apply consistent security and business policies across public and private clouds. Centralized traffic routing provides operations teams with application traffic and analytics visibility for troubleshooting. TKC supports Terraform and Ansible for CI/CD integration and is listed as an automated Kubernetes service-discovery option. Related Thunder ADC capabilities include Layer 4–7 load balancing, customizable health checks, aFleX scripting, TLS/SSL offloading, rate limiting and a web application firewall. TKC v2.4.2 is documented for Linux, self-hosted deployments using the ingress API model.
agentgateway
Agentgateway is a free, open-source HTTP and gRPC gateway for routing, securing, observing, and governing service, LLM, MCP, and agent-to-agent traffic. Its LLM gateway offers an OpenAI-compatible API for providers including OpenAI, Anthropic, Bedrock, Gemini, Vertex, and OSS Llama runs. Self-hosted inference routing supports vLLM, TGI, and Triton, with choices guided by latency, cost, and model. For MCP it supports server discovery, scoped tool calls, and audit trails; A2A routing connects runtimes such as LangChain, CrewAI, and ADK. Security features include JWT and OIDC, API keys, authorization policies, TLS and mTLS with certificate rotation, and rate limiting. Guardrails inspect MCP calls and responses for prompt injection and unsafe payloads, while prompt guards support checks and redaction. Observability includes OpenTelemetry, Prometheus token-usage histograms, Jaeger traces, and request logs with latency, token counts, and realized USD cost. It can run as a standalone binary, in Docker, or on Kubernetes. Commercial support is listed through a partner.