Contour vs Envoy Gateway

Contour is a free, self-hosted, open-source Kubernetes ingress controller that provides the control plane for the Envoy edge and service proxy. It supports Kubernetes Ingress v1, its HTTPProxy custom resource and Gateway API. Contour updates ingress configuration dynamically with minimal dropped connections and supports multiple configuration types in clusters used by multiple teams. It can run as a Kubernetes deployment or daemonset, and administrators can delegate access to wildcard certificates. Documented security features include TLS termination, client authorization, rate limiting, JWT verification and IP filtering. Contour and Envoy expose metrics that Prometheus can scrape, and documentation includes guides for cert-manager, Gatekeeper and AWS Network Load Balancer. The project is tested with Kubernetes 1.21 and later and is intended for both cluster administrators and application developers. Community support is available through the project's GitHub page, where users can report issues or ask questions. Contour is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation incubating project; its documentation includes a threat model, a security reporting process and a security fix checklist.

Envoy Gateway is a free, open-source application gateway for managing Envoy Proxy in standalone or Kubernetes-based deployments. It provisions and configures proxies through Kubernetes Gateway API resources, extending the API to expose Envoy features. Traffic management includes rate limiting, retries, circuit breaking, timeouts and failover. Security options include mTLS, JWT-based access control, OIDC integration and API-key authorization; listed authentication methods also include Basic Auth and external authorization. Envoy Gateway supports TLS termination and can attach an OCSP response from a Gateway certificate Secret during a TLS handshake. Metrics, access logging and distributed tracing are among its observability features. Installation options include Helm, Argo CD, Flux CD and Kubernetes YAML, though the quickstart requires a Kubernetes cluster. The project lists HTTP, HTTPS, gRPC, TLS, TCP and UDP support. Integrations and ecosystem projects include Envoy AI Gateway, Kuadrant, Knative, KServe and KEDA. Community help is directed through Envoy Slack, GitHub discussions and issues, and community meetings. Documentation cautions that the latest release includes recent main-branch commits and might not be stable.