Traefik Labs this week at the SUSECON 2026 conference demonstrated that its application-level gateway has now been integrated into the open source platforms provided by SUSE.

Company CEO Sudeep Goswami said that integration makes it simpler for IT teams that have deployed SUSE infrastructure to integrate multiple classes of applications at the Layer 7 level.

The Traefik gateway is already being used to integrate cloud native applications based on containers deployed on Kubernetes clusters, legacy monolithic applications based on virtual machines and increasingly artificial intelligence (AI) applications via a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that has been embedded into the gateway.

That integration uniquely enables IT teams to integrate cloud-native, legacy and AI applications at Layer 7 of the IT stack, said Goswami. That level of integration also creates an opportunity to unify governance, security and observability across all those IT environments, he added.

The Traefik Labs gateway is based on an open-source HTTP reverse proxy and load balancer. Written in the Go programming language, the Traefik Labs gateway is gaining traction in part because it was developed using a memory-safe language, said Goswami.

In addition, the Technical Oversight Committee that oversees the development of Kubernetes has decided to deprecate the Ingress application programming interface (API) many IT teams have relied on to integrate cloud-native applications. That decision has many IT teams re-evaluating their overall application connectivity strategy as their application portfolios become more diverse, said Goswami. More than half of existing Kubernetes environments have been using the Ingress API to connect applications, he noted.

In addition to SUSE, Traefik Labs has similar alliances in place with Nutanix, IBM and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) that collectively extend the reach of its gateway deeper into IT environments, noted Goswami. That level of integration makes it simpler for IT teams to deploy an application-level gateway, he added.

In general, a shift is occurring within networking teams as connectivity becomes more automated. There is still a need to manage the underlying routers and switches that provide the network foundation, but as those workflows become more automated there is now more focus on application connectivity. That shift, in turn, is making it feasible for DevOps and platform engineering teams to programmatically manage application connectivity at a higher level of abstraction, noted Goswami.

That capability is critical because while those teams can provision a virtual machine in a matter of minutes they often today still wait hours, often days, for networking teams to provide connectivity to an application. As networking becomes more integrated into software engineering workflows, the overall pace at which applications can actually be built and deployed should accelerate. The overall goal is to enable IT teams to achieve that goal by eliminating the silos that today hamper collaboration, said Goswami.

Naturally, the rate at which that transition might be made will vary widely from one IT team to another. However, as IT environments continue to evolve there is clearly going to be a need for more direct connectivity between applications at Layer 7 of the IT stack. The challenge will be teaching software engineering teams how to program and optimize the network services their applications ultimately depend on.