KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2024

From the beginning, the Gateway API has been designed to be extensible. With over 25 implementations to date, it’s crucial that these implementations have a way to support implementation-specific features without resorting to annotations. Among the various ways to extend the Gateway API, the Policy Attachment mechanism stands out as the most potent and challenging. In this session, we will explain what Policy Attachment is and share the lessons we learned at NGINX when implementing our own Policies. You will learn about: - The difference between direct and inherited policies. - How policy inheritance and merging works. - Corner cases, such as conflicting policies and invalid target refs. - Techniques to verify if a policy has been successfully applied. - Strategies for troubleshooting policies. We will show you examples of Gateway API policies as well as policies from multiple Gateway API implementations.