Exposing Spin apps on SpinKube with GatewayAPI

What is SpinKube What is Gateway API Build and deploy the Spin apps to Kubernetes Testing the Spin app Installing Gateway API CRDs and Controller Creating application-specific Gateway API Resources Accessing the Spin apps Conclusion Posted on February 26, 2026 by Thorsten Hans, SpinKube Maintainer and Senior Developer Advocate, Akamai CNCF projects highlighted in this post The Gateway API isn’t just an “Ingress v2”, it’s an entirely revamped approach for exposing services from within Kubernetes and eliminates the need of encoding routing capabilities into vendor-specific, unstructured annotations. In this post, we will explore how to expose WebAssembly applications built using the CNCF Spin framework and served by SpinKube using the Gateway API. SpinKube , a CNCF sandbox project, is an open-source stack for running serverless WebAssembly applications (Spin apps) on top of Kubernetes. Although SpinKube leverages Kubernetes primitives like Deployments, Services and Pods, there are no containers involved for running your serverless Spin apps at all. Instead, it leverages a containerd-shim implementation and spawns processes on the underlying Kubernetes worker nodes for running Spin apps. containerd-shim You can learn more about SpinKube and find detailed instructions on how to deploy SpinKube to your Kubernetes cluster at https://spinkube. dev. The Gateway API is the modern, role-oriented successor to the legacy Ingress resource, designed to provide a more expressive and extensible networking interface for Kubernetes. Unlike Ingress, which often relies on a messy sprawl of vendor-specific annotations to handle complex logic, the Gateway API breaks traffic management into atomic resources — GatewayClass, Gateway , and routes (like HTTPRoute or GRPCRoute ). Ingress GatewayClass, Gateway HTTPRoute GRPCRoute This separation allows infrastructure admins to manage the entry points while giving developers control over how their specific services are exposed, enabling native support for advanced traffic patterns like canary rollouts, header-based routing, and traffic mirroring without the need for bespoke configurations. To dive deeper into the technical specifications and resource hierarchy, head over to the official Gateway API documentation. Provisioning a Kubernetes cluster, installing SpinKube and implementing Spin apps are considered beyond the scope of this article.