Contour vs Kusk 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.

Kusk Gateway is a Kubernetes API gateway powered by Envoy, with native OpenAPI support. It uses OpenAPI definitions to configure a cluster's Ingress Controller, making it relevant to teams following an OpenAPI-first workflow for REST APIs. It can mock API responses for prototyping and automatically validate requests and responses. Teams can set request timeouts and CORS without coding, and adjust headers, CORS, limits, and quality of service globally or for individual paths.

An open-source dashboard supports API deployment and management, specification editing and validation, and API testing. The maker says an API can be published by adding an annotation to a service deployment, without additional configuration or DevOps support. Kusk can be installed on Mac, Linux, or Windows and is self-hosted. The project is 100% open source under the MIT License, with rate limiting and authentication policies listed. The maker presents it for teams building modern REST APIs on Kubernetes.