BoF | Beyond Nginx Ingress: Higress as the K8s Gateway for the AI Era

This talk introduces Higress, a modern high-performance gateway designed to replace the retiring Nginx Ingress in the Kubernetes environment. The speaker discusses the critical security concerns arising from the end-of-life status of Nginx and presents Higress's 90% compatibility with Nginx Ingress annotations, enabling a seamless migration for platform engineers without extensive rewriting of configuration files. Attendees will learn about Higress's Wasm-first extensibility architecture and how it minimizes risks associated with Lua scripts, illustrated by a case study from Sealos Cloud that highlights significant improvements in configuration latency. The session also explores advanced features like Token-based Rate Limiting and the new Model Context Protocol (MCP) support, illustrating how Higress effectively manages traffic for various AI applications and fosters unification within the expanding AI ecosystem.