Service mesh architecture, traffic management, and security features using Istio on AKS.
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The AKS App Routing add-on's Kubernetes Gateway API implementation — approuting-istio — is generally available. Together with that, the Managed Gateway API installation for AKS is also GA, so the CRDs, the controller stack, and the gateway data plane you need to run Gateway API on AKS are all now first-class, supported features.
As of AKS release v20260428 (April 28, 2026), both managed Gateway API (--enable-gateway-api) and the app routing Istio Gateway API implementation (--enable-app-routing-istio) are generally available on AKS.
You no longer need preview feature flags or the aks-preview extension; the steps later in this post reflect the original preview experience.
We're announcing preview support for the Kubernetes Gateway API in the AKS application routing add-on. This brings a modern, role-oriented traffic management model to AKS — and establishes a clear migration path ahead of the upcoming Ingress-NGINX retirement.
The Kubernetes SIG Network and the Security Response Committee have announced the upcoming retirement of the Ingress NGINX project, with maintenance ending in March 2026.
Kubernetes is great at orchestrating containers, but it can be a bit tricky to manage traffic routing. There are many options and implementations that you, as a cluster operator have probably had to deal with. We have the default Service resource that can be used to expose applications, but it is limited to routing based on layer 4 (TCP/UDP) and does not support more advanced traffic routing use cases. There's also the Ingress controller, which enabled layer 7 (HTTP) routing, and securing the North-South traffic using TLS, but it was not standardized and each vendor implementation required learning a new set of resource annotations. When it comes to managing and securing East-West traffic between services, there's Service Mesh which is yet another layer of infrastructure to manage on top of Kubernetes. And we're in the same boat when it comes to resource management with each vendor having their own ways of doing things.