Operating Gateway API in Production: What the Migration Guides Don't Cover

You migrated. Traffic is flowing. ReferenceGrants are in place. The controller reconciliation loop is clean. And then — quietly, without a single alert firing — things start breaking in ways your observability stack was never built to see. Most Gateway API migration guides end at cutover. That is the wrong place to stop. The real operational surface of gateway API production begins exactly where those guides close — and it is governed by a different set of failure physics than anything Ingress i