Announcing F5 NGINX Gateway Fabric 1.3.0 with Tracing, GRPCRoute, and Client Settings
The release of NGINX Gateway Fabric version 1.3.0, introduces plenty of highly requested features and improvements. GRPCRoutes are now supported to manage gRPC traffic, similar to the handling of HTTPRoute. The update includes new custom policies like ClientSettingsPolicy for client request configurations and ObservabilityPolicy for enabling application tracing with OpenTelemetry support. The GRPCRoute allows for efficient routing, header modifications, traffic weighting, and error conversion from HTTP to gRPC. We will explain how to set up NGINX Gateway Fabric to manage gRPC traffic using a Gateway and a GRPCRoute, providing a detailed example of the setup. It also outlines how to enable tracing through the NginxProxy resource and ObservabilityPolicy, emphasizing a selective approach to tracing to avoid data overload. Additionally, the ClientSettingsPolicy allows for the customization of NGINX directives at the Gateway or Route level, giving users control over certain NGINX behaviors with the possibility of overriding Gateway defaults at the Route level. Looking ahead, the NGINX Gateway Fabric team plans to work on TLS Passthrough, IPv6, and improvements to the testing suite, while preparing for larger updates like NGINX directive customization and separation of data and control planes. Check the end of the article to see how to get involved in the development process through GitHub and participate in bi-weekly community meetings. Further resources and links are also provided within.
