A10 Thunder Kubernetes Connector vs kgateway
A10 Thunder Kubernetes Connector
documentation.a10networks.com
kgateway
kgateway.devSide by side
| Figure | A10 Thunder Kubernetes Connector | kgateway |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | — | — |
| Free plan | — | — |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 0 | 1 |
| Spec score · Kubernetes Ingress Controllers | 7.7 (#11) | 7.0 (#22) |
| Founded | 2004 | 2018 |
| Integrations | A10 says the solution supports automation tools such as Terraform and Ansible for integration into CI/CD pipelines. | Documented integrations include Istio, AWS load balancers, Argo Rollouts, ExternalDNS, cert-manager, and OpenTelemetry. |
| Purpose | Thunder Kubernetes Connector (TKC) helps provide external access to applications running in a Kubernetes cluster with Thunder ADC. | Kgateway is a Kubernetes-native ingress controller and API gateway control plane that configures an Envoy data plane using the Kubernetes Gateway API. |
| 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. | Solo offers free community support through its Gloo Community and public GitHub repository. |
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.