Cilium

Talos is an immutable operating system designed to only run Kubernetes. The advantage of Talos is an out-of-the-box Kubernetes install, as well as a smaller attack surface, and easier maintenance.

In this article we’ll take a look at how to proxy external services through the Kubernetes Gateway API. There are of course more lightweight methods to proxy services, but once you already have the proverbial hammer, why not treat everything like a nail?

In my previous article we took a look at how to bootstrap K3s with Cilium starting from a fresh Debian 12 network installation.

Getting started with Kubernetes might seem like a daunting task at first, but getting a basic ephemeral cluster up and running with tools like minikube, kind, or k3d is quite straightforward if you follow their documentation.

In the Gateway API SIG’s own words, If you’re familiar with the older Ingress API, you can think of the Gateway API as analogous to a more-expressive next-generation version of that API.

For my homelab I’m running an over-engineered one-node Kubernetes “cluster” using Cilium as the Container Network Interface (CNI). Up until recently I used MetalLB for LoadBalancer IP Address Management (LB-IPAM) and L2 announcements for Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) requests over the local network, but Cilium has now replaced this functionality.