Install agentgateway

Install the agentgateway control plane and get agentgateway running in your cluster. Agentgateway is an open source, AI-first data plane that provides connectivity for agents, MCP tools, LLMs, and inferences in any environment. In Kubernetes environments, you can use agentgateway as the control plane to quickly spin up and manage the lifecycle of agentgateway proxies. The control plane translates Kubernetes Gateway API and agentgateway’s Kubernetes custom resources such as AgentgatewayPolicy and AgentgatewayBackend into proxy configuration for the data plane.

Before you begin

These steps assume that you have a Kubernetes cluster, kubectl, and helm already set up. For quick testing, you can use Kind.

kind create cluster

Install

The following steps get you started with a basic installation. For detailed instructions, see the installation guides.

1. Deploy the Kubernetes Gateway API CRDs.

   Standard Experimental

   kubectl apply -f https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/gateway-api/releases/download/v1.4.0/standard-install.yaml

   CRDs in the experimental channel are required to use some experimental features in the Gateway API. Guides that require experimental CRDs note this requirement in their prerequisites.

   kubectl apply --server-side -f https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/gateway-api/releases/download/v1.4.0/experimental-install.yaml

2. Deploy the CRDs for the agentgateway control plane by using Helm.

   helm upgrade -i agentgateway-crds oci://ghcr.io/kgateway-dev/charts/agentgateway-crds \
   --create-namespace --namespace agentgateway-system \
   --version v2.2.1 \
   --set controller.image.pullPolicy=Always

3. Install the agentgateway control plane by using Helm. To use experimental Gateway API features, include the experimental feature gate, --set controller.extraEnv.KGW_ENABLE_GATEWAY_API_EXPERIMENTAL_FEATURES=true.

   helm upgrade -i agentgateway oci://ghcr.io/kgateway-dev/charts/agentgateway \
     --namespace agentgateway-system \
     --version v2.2.1 \
     --set controller.image.pullPolicy=Always \
     --set controller.extraEnv.KGW_ENABLE_GATEWAY_API_EXPERIMENTAL_FEATURES=true

4. Make sure that the agentgateway control plane is running.

   kubectl get pods -n agentgateway-system

   Example output:

   NAME                        READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
   agentgateway-5495d98459-46dpk   1/1     Running   0          19s
   

Good job! You now have the agentgateway control plane running in your cluster.

Set up an agentgateway proxy

1. Create a Gateway that uses the agentgateway GatewayClass. The following example sets up a Gateway that uses the default agentgateway proxy template.

   kubectl apply -f- <<EOF
   apiVersion: gateway.networking.k8s.io/v1
   kind: Gateway
   metadata:
     name: agentgateway-proxy
     namespace: agentgateway-system
   spec:
     gatewayClassName: agentgateway
     listeners:
     - protocol: HTTP
       port: 80
       name: http
       allowedRoutes:
         namespaces:
           from: All
   EOF

2. Verify that the agentgateway proxy is created.

   • Gateway: Note that it might take a few minutes for an address to be assigned.
   • Pod for agentgateway-proxy: The pod has one container: agent-gateway.

   kubectl get gateway agentgateway-proxy -n agentgateway-system
   kubectl get deployment agentgateway-proxy -n agentgateway-system

   Example output:

   NAME           CLASS          ADDRESS                                                                  PROGRAMMED   AGE
   agentgateway-proxy   agentgateway   a1cff4bd974a34d8b882b2fa01d357f0-119963959.us-east-2.elb.amazonaws.com   True         6m9s
   NAME           READY   UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   AGE
   agentgateway-proxy   1/1     1            1           6m11s

3. Verify that the external IP has been created and is not pending.

   kubectl get svc -n agentgateway-system agentgateway-proxy

   Example output:

   NAME                 TYPE           CLUSTER-IP       EXTERNAL-IP   PORT(S)        AGE
   agentgateway-proxy   LoadBalancer   172.20.200.127   <pending>     80:30752/TCP   7m6s

4. Get the external address of the agentgateway proxy and save it in an environment variable.

   Cloud Provider LoadBalancerPort-forward for local testing

   export INGRESS_GW_ADDRESS=$(kubectl get svc -n agentgateway-system agentgateway-proxy -o jsonpath="{.status.loadBalancer.ingress[0]['hostname','ip']}")
   echo $INGRESS_GW_ADDRESS

   kubectl port-forward deployment/agentgateway-proxy -n agentgateway-system 8080:80

Next steps

Choose a quick start to route traffic with agentgateway:

Cleanup

No longer need agentgateway? Uninstall with the following command:

helm uninstall agentgateway agentgateway-crds -n agentgateway-system