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How ingress works

Kuma provides two features to manage ingress traffic, also known as north/south traffic. Both take advantage of a piece of infrastructure called a gateway proxy, that sits between external clients and your services in the mesh.

Delegated gateway: allows users to use any existing gateway proxy, like Kong.
Builtin gateway: configures instances of Envoy to act as a gateway.

Gateways exist within a Mesh. If you have multiple Meshes, each Mesh requires its own gateway. You can easily connect your Meshes together using cross-mesh gateways.

The below visualization shows the difference between delegated and builtin gateways. The blue lines represent traffic not managed by Kuma.

Builtin, with Kong Gateway at the edge:

Delegated Kong Gateway: