Index

Overview

Contour is an Ingress controller for Kubernetes that works by deploying the Envoy proxy as a reverse proxy and load balancer. Contour supports dynamic configuration updates out of the box while maintaining a lightweight profile.

Philosophy

• Follow an opinionated approach which allows us to better serve most users
• Design Contour to serve both the cluster administrator and the application developer
• Use our experience with ingress to define reasonable defaults for both cluster administrators and application developers.
• Meet users where they are by understanding and adapting Contour to their use cases

See the full Contour Philosophy page.

Why Contour?

Contour bridges other solution gaps in several ways:

• Dynamically update the ingress configuration with minimal dropped connections
• Safely support multiple types of ingress config in multi-team Kubernetes clusters
  • [Ingress/v1][10]
  • HTTPProxy (Contour custom resource)
  • Gateway API
• Cleanly integrate with the Kubernetes object model

Prerequisites

Contour is tested with Kubernetes clusters running version 1.21 and later.

Get started

Getting started with Contour is as simple as one command. See the Getting Started document.

Troubleshooting

If you encounter issues review the troubleshooting page, file an issue, or talk to us on the #contour channel on Kubernetes slack.

[10]: /docs/{{< param version >}}/config/ingress