Kusk Gateway vs NGINX Gateway Fabric

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.

NGINX Gateway Fabric is a self-hosted Kubernetes implementation of the Gateway API, using NGINX as its data plane for load balancing, reverse proxying, and API gateway use cases. Its control plane translates Gateway API resources into NGINX configuration. Supported resource coverage includes GatewayClass, Gateway, HTTPRoute, GRPCRoute, ReferenceGrant, TLSRoute, TCPRoute, UDPRoute, and BackendTLSPolicy, though the support level varies by resource. Traffic features include HTTP and TLS routing, redirects, rewrites, request mirroring, session persistence, and rate limiting. Security documentation covers HTTPS with cert-manager, mutual TLS, basic authentication, OpenID Connect, external authentication, and JWT authentication. Monitoring examples use Prometheus and Grafana; tracing uses OpenTelemetry collectors, including Jaeger examples. The free NGINX Open Source data-plane plan costs nothing. Installation is available through Helm from an OCI registry or from source, with Gateway API resources installed beforehand. Version 2.7.2 requires Kubernetes 1.32 or later; documented images are available for amd64 and arm64. Support is directed to GitHub issues and the NGINX Community Forum.