Announcing F5 NGINX Gateway Fabric 2.0.0 with a New Distributed Architecture

Today, F5 NGINX Gateway Fabric is reaching an important milestone. The release of NGINX Gateway Fabric 2.0 marks our transition into a distributed architecture that is highly scalable, secure, and flexible. This architecture also easily enables more advanced capabilities and prepares us for integration for observability and fleet management with F5 NGINX One. Here are the big highlights for this major release: 

• Control and Data Plane Separation 

• Multiple Gateway Support 

• HTTP Request Mirror 

• Listener Isolation 

• As always, bug fixes 

 

Data and Control Plane Separation 

Before 2.0, NGINX Gateway Fabric contained both the “control plane,” the container responsible for reading and applying configuration, and the “data plane,” the NGINX container where all traffic flows through, within the same pod. This meant if you scaled the NGINX Gateway Fabric pod, you would be forced to scale the data and control plane together. 

Now with our distributed architecture, the data plane deploys in a separate pod from the control plane. This allows us to enable more flexible use cases such as multiple gateways per control plane, a highly available control plane, and directly scaling NGINX replicas per Gateway. This makes NGINX Gateway Fabric much more resource efficient at scale. 

This change also improves NGINX Gateway Fabric’s security posture by limiting how much is accessible if a single pod is compromised. While NGINX Gateway Fabric and NGINX have always been secure by default, this architecture enables a two-tier defense against potential attacks: any security intrusion on the control plane has no way to directly access traffic, nor can the data plane directly access control plane interfaces. 

 

Multiple Gateways 

NGINX Gateway Fabric has historically been limited to a single Gateway object. We first chose this architecture for the short term because Routes are a good way to separate routing and access control for developers and cluster operators. As our product matures, we know that more advanced use cases require the isolation of infrastructure for separate teams, customers, or SLAs. Our new architecture enables you to do just that: 

In NGINX Gateway Fabric 2.0, every time you define a Gateway object, the control plane will provision an NGINX deployment, which can then be independently scaled by adding more replicas if needed. With this pattern, it’s easy to create a second, third, or many more Gateways. You can choose to give each customer or team in your cluster their own Gateway so they can each own their own infrastructure. Or you may want to separate infrastructure to apply separate policies based on hostname or product group. Each Gateway can also be scaled independently for varying levels of traffic, all managed by a single control plane. 

 

HTTP Request Mirrors 

Request mirrors are often useful when you want to mirror traffic to analyze traffic for security issues or to test a new version of an application with production traffic without impacting current users. All request responses to a mirrored location are ignored, so request mirrors serve as another useful tool for testing and analysis. 

These mirrors are added using a filter on the route rule. They will only affect a small group of traffic you choose. If you need more, you can add as many as you need. 

 

Listener Isolation 

We decided to also include the concept of listener isolation in this release to make advanced configurations more intuitive to work with and guard against accidental misconfiguration. Listener isolation means that any request should match at most one Listener within a Gateway. The Gateway API lists this example below: 

If Listeners are defined for "foo.example.com" and "*.example.com", a request to "foo.example.com" SHOULD only be routed using routes attached to the "foo.example.com" Listener and NOT the "*.example.com" Listener. 

The alternative is that request may match against multiple listeners unintentionally, which can become a problem when different policies are applied to the other listeners, or the request is routed to the wrong location. Now, NGINX Gateway Fabric will ensure that a Route will only match the most specific Listener on the Gateway it is attached to. 

 

What’s Next 

Our next release will be primarily focused around delivering more extended features from the Gateway API in an effort to support all extended features at the extended support level. If you are unfamiliar, the Gateway API has three separate support levels for every feature in the specification: 

• Core: Portable features that all implementations should support. 

• Extended: Portable features that are not universally supported across implementations. Implementations that support the feature should have the same behavior and semantics. Some extended features may eventually move to core. 

• Implementation-specific: These features are not portable and vendor-specific. These features are far less defined in API and schema. 

You can see the full description of support levels here. 

So far, NGINX Gateway Fabric has supported all core features since 1.0 and has slowly been adding extended features over the past few releases. For 2.1, we will have a greater focus on these features to enable more advanced use cases. We plan to have all extended features available in NGINX Gateway Fabric by 2.2.

For F5 NGINX Plus users, 2.1 will bring connection to the F5 NGINX One Console with basic fleet management capabilities. We plan on expanding these capabilities to include Observability for all NGINX deployments in your organization in the near future. 

2.1 will also include support for F5 NGINX App Protect Web Application Firewall to protect your applications from any incoming malicious traffic. Specifically, NGINX Gateway Fabric will be implementing support for v5, with a new configuration experience coming later this year. 

 

Resources 

For the complete changelog for NGINX Gateway Fabric 2.0.0, see the Release Notes. To try NGINX Gateway Fabric for Kubernetes with NGINX Plus, start your free 30-day trial today or contact us to discuss your use cases. 

If you would like to get involved, see what is coming next, or see the source code for NGINX Gateway Fabric, check out our repository on GitHub! 

We have weekly community meetings on Tuesdays at 9:30AM Pacific/12:30PM Eastern/5:30PM GMT. Meeting links, updates, agenda, and notes are on the NGINX Gateway Fabric Meeting Calendar. Links are also always available from our GitHub readme.