Airlock Microgateway vs HAProxy Ingress

Airlock Microgateway is a Kubernetes-native Web Application and API Protection solution that also serves as an identity-aware proxy. It runs as a container in Kubernetes clusters and is configured through GitOps. The gateway supports Kubernetes Gateway API and is positioned as an upgrade from Ingress NGINX. It validates identities through OIDC, JWT, token exchange or mutual TLS, then applies role- and path-based access control. Protection features include deny rules, CSRF protection, OpenAPI specification enforcement and GraphQL validation against OWASP Top 10 threats. Its Envoy-based reverse proxy supports routing, TLS termination, client certificate authentication and caller IP forwarding. Integrations include Cilium and Istio, and the product is certified for Red Hat OpenShift. Prometheus and Grafana provide monitoring, while logs use ECS format. Deployment can be multi-cloud or hybrid-cloud, but remains self-hosted. Community Edition is free for small environments or local development, with enforced throughput and six-month license validity. The free evaluation license specifies 5 requests per second, at most two replicas per gateway and six-month validity. Premium Edition has no listed price and is intended for enterprise setups.

HAProxy Ingress is a free, self-hosted controller that configures HAProxy to route external requests to applications in a Kubernetes cluster. It applies changes made in the cluster to HAProxy without requiring a separate update process. The project supports Ingress and Gateway API resources and describes more than 200 configuration options. Gateway API support is partial: the documented implementation covers GatewayClass, Gateway, TCPRoute, and HTTPRoute, but not HTTPRoute filters or resource status updates. Installation uses a Helm chart and requires Helm 3, a running Kubernetes cluster, and administrative privileges in that cluster. Version 0.16 requires Kubernetes 1.21 or newer. Local cluster options named by the project include minikube, kind, k3s, k3d, and colima. It associates requests with ingress hosts using TLS SNI and the Host header. Metrics can be collected with Prometheus and Grafana using Prometheus Operator. The project uses the Apache-2.0 license and lists community channels including Slack, a users mailing list, and Stack Overflow.