Posted on June 11, 2025 by Arko Dasgupta & Erica Hughberg

A year of GA

What Does GA Mean?

A lot can happen in a year, and a lot has happened for Envoy Gateway since it reached general availability a little over a year ago. Before exploring the milestones, let’s pause and discuss what “going GA” means.

GA is a level of promise, a stamp of confidence, and the assertion that a project is ready for production. It means reliability and stability. But it doesn’t mean the journey is over. It’s not the finish line. GA is a springboard, a sign that the foundation is strong enough to build on and move forward faster.

That’s precisely what we’ve seen with Envoy Gateway: a year of incredible feature innovation, acceleration, and community growth.

Envoy Gateway’s DNA: Built In the Open

Envoy Gateway stands out in many ways. Envoy Gateway was born in the open-source world. It was never closed source, owned, or controlled by a single commercial entity. It’s created by a community of builders and users who have worked together to make it easy to leverage the power of Envoy Proxy at scale. As part of the Envoy ecosystem, Envoy Gateway works in conjunction with Envoy Proxy, with a builder community contributing to both the data plane and the control plane.

This DNA matters. It sets the tone not just for the code but also for the culture.

From 1.0 to 1.4: A Year of Acceleration

Envoy Gateway went GA in March 2024 as a performant and functional implementation of the Kubernetes Gateway API. Even then, it had already extended beyond the Gateway API, surfacing key Envoy Proxy capabilities in a simple and accessible way.

Since 1.0, we’ve seen four major releases packed with new features, performance improvements, and refinements. Builders didn’t just improve Envoy Gateway; they also contributed to Envoy Proxy, ensuring that the control plane and data plane evolved together. 

The community of builders and users has defined and created Envoy Gateway today and its future. It’s a community effort driven by practical needs and a healthy, collaborative environment.

Envoy Gateway’s impact extends beyond end-users who leverage it in their applications and systems. Other projects, such as Knative, KServe, AIBrix, k0rdent, and Kuadrant, also leverage Envoy Gateway in their solutions.

Lastly, within the Envoy ecosystem, the Envoy AI Gateway has evolved to extend the functionality of Envoy Gateway to address the rapidly emerging and changing needs of AI traffic handling.

The Three Communities Around Envoy Gateway

When we look at Envoy Gateway’s first year, it’s impossible not to see the impact of three distinct, but interconnected, communities:

1. The Builder Community

Who are the builders? They are maintainers, contributors, and steering committee members from end-user organizations and vendors.

Today, the Builder community has 211 contributors and 54 different companies represented. In the latest release, v1.4, 65 builders contributed features, bug fixes, and documentation to the project. 

contributors

They are the heart of Envoy Gateway’s rapid evolution.

2. The End User Community

Envoy Gateway isn’t just being built; it’s being used. Adoption has grown, with new logos showcasing end-users added to the site and end users joining as project maintainers. With adopters from innovative startups to Fortune 500 companies, running at critical scale, it is an end-user community of people who bring varied perspectives. 

We have seen the monthly pulls of the Gateway-Helm Chart increase, especially in 2025.
Users aren’t just deploying it, they’re building on it. 

gateway-helm monthly

You can join the end-user community and have conversations on Slack in the #gateway-users channel and our weekly end-user community meetings on Thursdays. These are there to enable and support each other in adopting and using Envoy Gateway.

End users contribute to the community in many different ways, from helping each other, asking questions, and sharing their ideas for new features to raising GitHub issues.

3. The Silent Adopter Community

And then there’s the “silent” community, which I like to call those adopters we don’t always hear from directly in Slack or on GitHub. These people pull the images and run Envoy Gateway at scale, and sometimes, we only learn about them through a quiet “Hey, we use Envoy Gateway” conversation at a conference.

They may be silent, but they are part of the story too, one may even argue the most crucial part. Vital, real-world usage that pushes the project forward in invisible but essential ways. So when they speak, however low their whisper, we listen. It isn’t the loudest voice in the room that carries the most weight.

Personal Reflection: From Spectator to Contributor

Long before I joined the community, I was just a follower. I watched Envoy Gateway from a distance, excited by its potential. I recall seeing that blog post on Medium announcing Envoy Gateway, and it seemed too little, too late. I needed it yesterday, even at that time. I was tired of heavy, feature-bloated gateway solutions that did too much and complicated the simple, everyday API traffic handling I required. I also felt frustrated by excessive annotations on Ingress solutions.

Envoy Gateway made sense. It was clear, simple, extensible, and powerful. The Gateway API also made sense. I was impatient at the time, and it wasn’t there yet. Now, in 2025, it’s different. I’m excited about where we are and the speed at which we and the industry have been moving. This past year has gone faster than I imagined, and we are still accelerating.

I never would have believed back then that I’d be writing this post today, not as a spectator, but as a contributor to Envoy Gateway and as a maintainer of Envoy AI Gateway, collaborating closely within the Envoy community. Often, I advocate for the silent users, serving as a voice for their needs to ensure they are catered to. I mentor contributors who are starting their journey in open source. This has also been a journey for me, and I look forward to more people joining.

This is a community of builders, of people shaping the future of cloud-native traffic handling together, because connectivity, enabling software components to communicate, and managing that communication are critical.

Looking Ahead

A year ago, Envoy Gateway went GA. It wasn’t the finish line. It was the starting line.

Built open. Growing together and innovating faster. That’s the story so far. And if the past year is any sign, the next one will be even more exciting.

Thank you to everyone who built, used, adopted silently, or cheered from the sidelines.
Let’s keep building. Let’s keep imagining what’s possible and making it real. 

Envoy Gateway Greatest Hits (so far)

Because I love a good Greatest Hits collection, I’ve compiled a completely biased list of my top five features added in each release since the 1.0 GA release.  I can’t wait to see where we go next. The best part? We build together. Jump into the community and help shape what’s next in 1.5 and beyond.

1.1 Release

  1. Use Backend Resource to route outside of K8s [link]
  2. Use Backend Resource to connect to ExtProc over UDS  [link]
  3. Leverage incremental mTLS rollout for Client to Gateway with optional client certificate [link]
  4. Reuse BackendTrafficPolicy by applying policies to multiple targetRefs on policies  [link]
  5. Allows users to re-order Envoy HTTP filters  [link]

1.2 Release

  1. Resource Access Control with JWT Claims-Based Authorization  [link]
  2. IPv4/IPv6 Dual-Stack Support [link]
  3. Direct Responses and Header Rewrites [Direct Response] [Request Headers] [Response Headers]
  4. Active/Passive Failover [link]
  5. Session Persistence in HTTPRoute [link]

1.3 Release

  1. API Key Authentication [link]
  2. Dynamic Cost-Based Rate Limiting Configuration [link] [Leveraged in Envoy AI Gateway]
  3. Custom Response Overrides, like a custom 404 page [link]
  4. Support for Response Compression in the BackendTrafficPolicy API [link]
  5. CIDR-based Client IP Access Control [link]

1.4 Release

  1. Support for Lua in EnvoyExtensionPolicy [link]
  2. Dynamic upstream target selection [link]
  3. Backend Credential Injection from Kubernetes Secrets [link]
  4. Zone-aware routing for lower latency and cost optimization[link]
  5. Protect your applications with Request Buffering [link]

Get started with Envoy Gateway and the Community

Haven’t tried Envoy Gateway yet? Take it for a spin with the quickstart: https://gateway.envoyproxy.io/docs/tasks/quickstart/
My best tip is to try it out locally using the Docker Desktop Kubernetes cluster, which makes life so easy.

I look forward to seeing you in the community, on Slack, and in our end-user meetings.

Join us on Slack: https://communityinviter.com/apps/envoyproxy/envoy

Find us on the #gateway-users channel

Got questions about Envoy Gateway?

Never hesitate to drop a question on GitHub Q&A: https://github.com/envoyproxy/gateway/discussions/new?category=q-a