Support for spec.infrastructure.service.annotations in NGINX Gateway Fabric (for AWS NLB target-type=ip)

[xjg2010go]

Hi team,

I'm currently using NGINX Gateway Fabric v2.2.0 on EKS and integrating it with the AWS Load Balancer Controller.
The controller automatically creates an NLB with target-type=instance (NodePort) whenever a Gateway is created via GatewayClass.

To achieve target-type=ip (pod IP mode), I tried adding these annotations under spec.kubernetes.service.annotations in my NginxProxy, but the CRD rejected it with the following error:

strict decoding error: unknown field "spec.kubernetes.service.annotations"

Later I noticed discussions suggesting that v2.3.0+ may introduce a new field like:

spec:
infrastructure:
service:
annotations:
service.beta.kubernetes.io/aws-load-balancer-type: "nlb"
service.beta.kubernetes.io/aws-load-balancer-nlb-target-type: "ip"

However, I couldn’t find any confirmation or documentation for this.

Questions:

Will spec.infrastructure.service.annotations be officially supported in v2.3.0 (or a later release)?

Is there currently any supported way to configure AWS-specific annotations for the automatically generated LoadBalancer service (without manually patching it)?

If not, is it recommended to manually manage the Service (data plane) instead of using NginxProxy for AWS EKS environments?

Thanks for your help — this feature is very important for using NGINX Gateway Fabric with AWS NLB (IP mode).

[nginx-bot]

Hi @xjg2010go! Welcome to the project! 🎉

Thanks for opening this issue!
Be sure to check out our Contributing Guidelines and the Issue Lifecycle while you wait for someone on the team to take a look at this.

[salonichf5]

Hey @xjg2010go thank you for your interest in our project. Currently, we allow patching annotations for our service objects. You can edit the values.yaml to have the patch be applied using helm chart.

    patches:
      - type: JSONPatch
        value:
          - op: add
            path: /metadata/annotations/service.beta.kubernetes.io~1aws-load-balancer-type
            value: "nlb"

Is there currently any supported way to configure AWS-specific annotations for the automatically generated LoadBalancer service (without manually patching it)? - I don't think so, we are currently trying to add this capability to allow smoother integration with other tools but currently this is the only option.

Let me know if this solves your current issue.

[sjberman]

You can also set in the Gateway infrastructure field like you proposed, there's just not a nested "service" object, so it's applied to all objects.