Kubernetes Gateway API vs Ingress vs LoadBalancer: What to Use in 2026

I've watched teams "just add an annotation" and accidentally turn their ingress controller into a production API nobody owns. If you're choosing between Service type LoadBalancer, Ingress, and Gateway API in 2026, you're really choosing who gets to change traffic rules, how safely they can do it, and how ugly rollback feels at 2am. The Blunt 2026 Rule: Pick the Layer First Most debates happen at L7, but plenty of outages start at L4 when someone changes the wrong shared object. Expose raw TCP/UDP: Use Service type LoadBalancer. Boring L4 plumbing, smallest number of moving parts. Route HTTP(S) in one team's cluster: Keep Ingress if your controller and annotations already behave like a stable product in your org. Share one edge across teams and namespaces: Use Gateway API. Built-in "platform owns the Gateway, app teams own Routes" split. Decision Tree (The One You Can Actually Use) This bit me when we tried to "standardize ingress." We ended up with six different annotation dialects and