Traefik Proxy 3.6 completes unified networking vision with Knative support, intelligent routing, and Gateway API v1.4

KUBECON NORTH AMERICA, Atlanta – [November 11, 2025] – Traefik Labs, creator of the world's leading cloud-native application proxy with over 3.4 billion downloads, today unveiled its application intelligence platform that unifies application-layer routing, security, and observability across VMs, containers, and serverless workloads. The platform supports deployment across any environment—from public cloud to fully air-gapped facilities—enabling organizations to maintain operational independence and data sovereignty. The announcement includes Traefik Proxy 3.6, which adds Knative support for serverless functions, multi-layer routing for context-aware traffic decisions, and full support for Kubernetes Gateway API v1.4.

Traefik Labs is exhibiting at KubeCon North America, booth #1640.

Beyond Infrastructure Silos

As enterprises modernize application architectures, application delivery has become fragmented across VMs, containerized microservices, and serverless functions—each requiring different gateway solutions, configurations, and expertise. This fragmentation creates operational complexity, inconsistent security policies, and limited visibility.

Traefik's application intelligence platform eliminates this by operating at the application layer—understanding HTTP requests, user identity, and business context to make intelligent routing decisions that traditional IP-level routing cannot deliver. Organizations enforce the same policies, security controls, and observability whether applications run on VMs, Kubernetes containers, or serverless functions.

"The industry has sadly accepted infrastructure-specific application delivery as inevitable, forcing teams to manage separate stacks for VMs, containers, and serverless," said Sudeep Goswami, CEO at Traefik Labs. "We're proving that's a false choice. Organizations can have unified application intelligence that works everywhere while remaining open and standards-based. This is infrastructure that adapts to your applications, not the other way around."

Complete Platform Capabilities

Traefik’s application intelligence platform delivers unified application-layer routing across three infrastructure layers:

Virtual Machine Support: Through integration with platforms like Nutanix AHV with Flow Networking, Traefik bridges traditional VM workloads with cloud-native infrastructure. Organizations apply consistent traffic management and security policies across legacy and modern applications, enabling gradual modernization while maintaining existing VM investments through a single application intelligence layer.

Container-Native Application Intelligence: Traefik provides seamless integration across the entire container ecosystem, from standalone Docker to any Kubernetes distribution, including AKS, EKS, GKE, OKE, on-premises, and edge deployments. With automatic service discovery, native support for Kubernetes standards (Ingress and Gateway API), and Traefik's IngressRoute CRD for advanced routing, organizations can deploy consistent application intelligence across all environments without relying on platform-specific tooling.

Serverless Integration: Traefik Proxy 3.6 adds native Knative support, completing the platform's infrastructure coverage. With Knative recently graduating from CNCF, Traefik enables enterprises to adopt serverless Kubernetes workloads with the same application intelligence applied to VMs and containers—unified gateway, consistent policies, and seamless observability.

Traefik Proxy 3.6: Intelligence and Standards

Traefik Proxy 3.6 introduces three significant capabilities that enhance the application intelligence platform:

Knative Support for Serverless Workloads: Native integration with Knative Serving brings enterprise-grade application intelligence to Kubernetes serverless workloads. Traefik automatically discovers Knative services, routes traffic to active instances, or triggers the Knative Activator to wake scaled-to-zero services on demand, and supports weighted traffic splitting for progressive rollouts. Organizations can deploy event-driven APIs, ML inference services, and sporadic workloads that scale down to minimize costs while maintaining consistent routing policies and observability.

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Multi-Layer Routing for Context-Aware Decisions: Routing decisions often depend on information that doesn't exist in the original request—like user role after authentication, customer subscription tier, or feature flags. Multi-layer routing solves this by authenticating or checking external systems once at a parent routing level, then making intelligent routing decisions at child levels based on enriched context. This eliminates the need to duplicate authentication logic across microservices or build routing proxies that introduce latency.

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Gateway API v1.4 with Full Conformance: Complete support for Kubernetes Gateway API v1.4 with 100% conformance across all HTTP core and extended features, plus TCPRoute and TLSRoute. Traefik's continued leadership includes same-day support for the latest specification and over six years of active contribution to the standard. Organizations can adopt Gateway API with confidence, knowing that Traefik delivers proven production readiness, complete conformance testing, and immediate support for new releases, without requiring vendor-specific workarounds or implementation gaps.

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Industry Impact

These capabilities position Traefik as the only platform delivering unified application intelligence from traditional infrastructure through cloud-native serverless. Unlike cloud-dependent competitors, Traefik operates identically from public cloud to air-gapped environments, providing true operational independence. While infrastructure vendors focus on specific deployment models and cloud providers create lock-in, Traefik delivers consistent application-layer routing everywhere.

Organizations gain operational simplification through unified tooling, consistent security policy enforcement, and gradual modernization flexibility. The platform's standards-based approach ensures portability while delivering enterprise-grade capabilities.

“Traefik Labs’ launch of its application intelligence platform marks an advancement in unifying application delivery across virtual machines, containers, and serverless environments,” said Paul Nashawaty, Practice Lead and Principal Analyst at theCUBE Research. “Data from my research shows that over 70% of enterprises operate mixed infrastructure models, but fewer than 40% have consistent security and policy enforcement across those platforms. By extending support for Knative and achieving full conformance with Kubernetes Gateway API v1.4, Traefik Labs provides a standards-based framework that simplifies operations and improves visibility across heterogeneous environments. This capability is critical as organizations modernize legacy workloads and pursue greater operational independence and data sovereignty in hybrid and multi-cloud deployments.”

Traefik Proxy 3.6 is generally available today. Learn more here

Traefik and the Traefik logo are trademarks of Traefik Labs. NVIDIA and NIM are trademarks of NVIDIA Corporation. Nutanix is a trademark of Nutanix Corporation. Knative is a trademark of The Linux Foundation.

Containers

Traefik Labs Unveils Application Intelligence Platform Spanning VMs, Containers, and Serverless