HAProxy Ingress vs Kusk Gateway

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.

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.