Istio kind of sucks TBH from the architecture astronauts getting high on their own supply. It reminds me of the worst excesses of OOP abstraction. The sort of code that you want to burn down to the ground after hitting your head against it for a few days.

The Gateway API is a relatively straightforward implementation of "north-south" traffic and doesn't try to handle "east-west" traffic, limiting its complexity. Its existence means I can use something more sane like Contour, but it's built on common resources that Istio can understand nicely as well, if need be. So the overall advantage is that you can hop between implementations without having to relearn everything from scratch.

My biggest frustration with the Gateway API is actually how extensions are developed: the spec just doesn't (or didn't last time I looked) touch timeouts other than just saying "implementation defined" because of the different ways that's handled currently. To create extensions, just define your own custom resource that does whatever you want not currently covered by the spec.

Istio and other popular tools has implemented its own gateway APIs because of the limits of Ingress API.

So the the new Gateway API seem to support more use cases so the user can use a more portable API.

Istio and many other tools already supports this: https://gateway-api.sigs.k8s.io/implementations/#implementat...