Experimental Features

Nantian Gateway ships several experimental features that are disabled by default. These APIs are useful for testing AI routing, token policies, Wasm extensions, and experimental Gateway API policies, but their schemas and runtime behavior may change.

Experimental APIs

Enable these features deliberately. Install the required CRDs, enable the matching control plane and data plane flags, and test the full route path before relying on experimental behavior.

Feature Flags

Plane	Helm value	Default	Controls
Control plane	controlplane.config.features.enableExperimentalGateway	false	Registers experimental Gateway-policy-related types including BackendLBPolicy, TokenPolicy, and WasmPlugin support in the control plane scheme.
Control plane	controlplane.config.features.enableAiGateway	false	Registers AIService support in the control plane scheme.
Data plane	dataplane.config.experimental.enableExperimentalGateway	false	Enables data plane handling for experimental gateway runtime behavior where implemented.
Data plane	dataplane.config.experimental.enableAiGateway	false	Enables data plane AI gateway runtime behavior where implemented.

Control plane flags decide which resources the manager can register and reconcile. Data plane flags decide which experimental runtime behavior is enabled after snapshots arrive.

Enable With Helm

Create experimental-values.yaml:

controlplane:
  config:
    features:
      enableExperimentalGateway: true
      enableAiGateway: true

dataplane:
  config:
    experimental:
      enableExperimentalGateway: true
      enableAiGateway: true

Apply it during install or upgrade:

helm upgrade --install nantian-gw nantian-gw/nantian-gw \
  --namespace nantian-gw \
  --create-namespace \
  -f experimental-values.yaml

Restarted pods should pick up the rendered ConfigMaps. Check logs after the rollout to confirm both planes started with the intended configuration.

Enable With Kustomize

Kustomize users should edit or replace the ConfigMaps generated by the base manifests. The base gateway/deploy/kubernetes/base/kustomization.yaml uses:

• gateway/configs/controlplane/config.yaml
• gateway/configs/dataplane/config.yaml

The data plane repository also carries the runtime default at dataplane/configs/dataplane/config.yaml; keep it aligned when updating data plane-owned examples.

Control plane fragment:

features:
  enableExperimentalGateway: true
  enableAiGateway: true

Data plane fragment:

experimental:
  enableExperimentalGateway: true
  enableAiGateway: true

Use an overlay when possible instead of editing base files in-place.

Required CRDs

Install the standard Gateway API CRDs for core resources such as Gateway and HTTPRoute. For experimental resources, you also need the relevant CRDs:

• Gateway API experimental CRDs for BackendLBPolicy.
• Nantian CRDs from the gateway base manifests:
  • aiservices.gateway.nantian.dev
  • tokenpolicies.gateway.nantian.dev
  • wasmplugins.gateway.nantian.dev

The Nantian CRDs are namespaced extension resources under gateway.nantian.dev/v1alpha1. BackendLBPolicy is a Gateway API experimental resource under gateway.networking.k8s.io/v1alpha2.

Verify

Check CRDs first:

kubectl get crd aiservices.gateway.nantian.dev
kubectl get crd tokenpolicies.gateway.nantian.dev
kubectl get crd wasmplugins.gateway.nantian.dev
kubectl get crd backendlbpolicies.gateway.networking.k8s.io

Then check running configuration through logs:

kubectl logs -n nantian-gw deploy/nantian-gw-controlplane --tail=100
kubectl logs -n nantian-gw deploy/nantian-gw-dataplane --tail=100

Missing CRDs cause resource creation failures. Disabled control plane feature flags can make resources unavailable to the manager scheme. Disabled data plane flags can prevent experimental runtime behavior even when the control plane accepts the objects.

Use The APIs

After the CRDs and flags are in place, create resources that match the current schemas. Start with Custom And Experimental Resources for examples of AIService, TokenPolicy, WasmPlugin, and BackendLBPolicy.