Kong Operator reconciles Gateway resources differently to Kong Ingress Controller. Kong Operator’s approach is known as managed gateways, and the Kong Ingress Controller approach is referred to as unmanaged gateways.
When Kong Operator detects a new Gateway, it creates a ControlPlane (an in memory instance of Kong Ingress Controller) and a DataPlane (Kong Gateway). This ControlPlane reconciles exactly one Gateway.
As Kong Operator manages the lifecycle of Kong Gateway deployments, it can dynamically configure the DataPlane based on information in the Gateway listeners.
For example, when creating a Gateway with only one HTTP listener on port 80, the DataPlane ingress service will be configured so that only port 80 will be exposed. If you add a Gateway HTTPS listener on port 443, this change will be taken by Kong Operator and applied to the DataPlane. The final result will be an ingress service exposing ports 80 for HTTP traffic and 443 for HTTPS traffic.
Ports 80 and 443 are examples. You can configure any combination of
Gatewaylisteners that you need, and Kong Operator will configure yourDataPlaneappropriately.