Use Gateways to route ingress requests to multiple endpoints¶

If you want to expose multiple service endpoints behind a single host name, you can create a gateway . A gateway has a hostname similar to a public service endpoint. For more information about public service endpoints, see Configure service ingress.

Gateways route ingress requests, including inference requests, from outside Snowflake to one or more service endpoints. With Gateways, you can do the following:

• Traffic split among services: You can allow multiple services to share the same hostname. Routing is done based on the percentage given for each service. This is useful in the following scenarios:

  • A/B testing scenario: You might choose to update a service and deploy it while keeping the original service running. For testing, you might choose to route a certain percentage of incoming ingress requests to the updated service for testing.

  • High-availability scenario: You have a highly available service that is deployed across, say, two compute pools, where each compute pool is created in a different placement group. You might choose to use the gateway to split incoming ingress requests.

• Stable URL: Each gateway has a hostname allocated at creation. The hostname doesn’t change for the lifetime of the gateway object. You can alter the gateway object to route to different endpoints or have different percentage configurations. Changes take effect within a minute.

The following list shows the differences between a service endpoint and a gateway:

• Browser security: Service endpoint supports CORS configuration (corsSettings) and cloud service provider (CSP) headers for browser-based access through external access integrations. A gateway currently doesn’t support CORS or CSP headers.

• Caller’s rights: Service endpoint supports caller’s rights. A gateway currently doesn’t support caller’s rights.

• Role-based access control (RBAC): When you use a service endpoint, access is managed by using service roles. When you use a gateway, access is managed by granting the USAGE privilege on the gateway object. Users accessing a gateway don’t need service roles for the underlying service endpoints.

Gateway routing respects the relative percentage of the specified healthy endpoints. For more information about a gateway’s failover behavior, see Gateway failover behavior.

After you’ve reviewed the following sections, you can create and alter a gateway. For information about creating a gateway, see CREATE GATEWAY. For information about altering a gateway, see ALTER GATEWAY.