HAProxy Technologies just pulled off one of its most meaningful open-source moves in years. At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2025, where the company is a Diamond sponsor, it unveiled the HAProxy Unified Gateway—a free, open-source gateway designed to unify Kubernetes traffic management under one roof, bridging both the old Ingress standard and the emerging Gateway API. For anyone who has wrestled with the growing pains of Kubernetes networking, this feels like a relief valve and a bit of long-awaited maturity in the ecosystem.
The Unified Gateway answers a long-standing headache: enterprises have been juggling separate products from different vendors to handle legacy Ingress setups and newer Gateway API workloads. With HAProxy’s new approach, there’s finally a low-risk migration path that lets teams modernize gradually instead of ripping out what works. It’s flexible enough to accommodate both modern cloud-native services and older, TCP-based applications that never quite fit the Ingress mold. And because it’s built on HAProxy’s core load-balancing engine—the same one that can hit over two million HTTPS requests per second on a single AWS Graviton2 instance—it brings production-grade reliability to the free tier right from day one.
What makes this launch even more compelling is its deliberate architectural sensibility. The Gateway API model, unlike Ingress, was designed with role separation in mind: cluster operators, infrastructure teams, and application developers can each manage their domains without stepping on each other’s toes. HAProxy implements this natively, reducing operational risk and friction across teams. It’s also ready for mixed environments, meaning organizations can test Gateway API configurations while still keeping existing Ingress routes running side by side—a graceful coexistence that many Kubernetes admins will appreciate.
Though the Unified Gateway will remain free and open source, HAProxy is clearly signaling an upward path. The 2026 enterprise version, folded into the *HAProxy One* platform, will expand the vision to multi-cluster, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments with features like centralized management via HAProxy Fusion, global security controls (including DDoS mitigation and WAF), and universal north-south/east-west traffic handling. That’s where it starts to feel like a complete application delivery fabric for the modern enterprise.
For now, the public beta is live on Docker Hub and open for contribution on GitHub, and HAProxy’s developers are openly calling for community feedback. It’s a confident move that reflects the company’s two decades of trust in open-source performance engineering—and a recognition that the Kubernetes networking stack is finally ready for unification instead of fragmentation.
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