API gateways serve as critical enforcement points for security, governance, and traffic management in cloud-native systems. As organizations increasingly adopt multi-cluster and hybrid cloud deployments, maintaining consistent policy enforcement, predictable performance, and operational stability across heterogeneous gateway environments becomes challenging. Existing approaches typically manage security, governance, and performance as loosely coupled concerns, leading to configuration drift, delayed policy propagation, and unstable runtime behavior under dynamic workloads. This paper presents a governance-aware, intent-driven architecture for coordinated API gateway management in multi-cluster cloud environments. The proposed approach expresses security, governance, and performance objectives as high-level declarative intents, which are systematically translated into enforceable gateway configurations and continuously validated through policy verification and telemetry-driven feedback. By decoupling intent specification from enforcement while enabling bounded, policy-compliant adaptation, the architecture supports heterogeneous gateway implementations without compromising governance guarantees or service-level objectives. A prototype implementation across multiple Kubernetes clusters demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed design. Experimental results show up to a 42% reduction in policy drift, a 31% improvement in configuration propagation time, and sustained p95 latency overhead below 6% under variable workloads, compared to manual and declarative baseline approaches. These results indicate that governance-aware, intent-driven gateway orchestration provides a scalable and reliable foundation for secure, consistent, and performance-predictable cloud-native platforms.

翻译：API网关在云原生系统中充当安全、治理与流量管理的关键执行点。随着组织日益采用多集群与混合云部署，在异构网关环境中维持一致的政策执行、可预测的性能及运行稳定性变得极具挑战。现有方法通常将安全、治理与性能作为松散耦合的关注点分别管理，导致配置漂移、政策传播延迟以及在动态工作负载下运行时行为不稳定。本文提出一种面向多集群云环境的、具备治理感知能力的意图驱动架构，用于协调API网关管理。该方法将安全、治理与性能目标表达为高层级声明式意图，系统性地将其转换为可执行的网关配置，并通过政策验证与遥测驱动的反馈持续进行校验。通过将意图规范与执行解耦，同时支持有界且符合政策的自适应调整，该架构能够在保障治理要求与服务级别目标的前提下兼容异构网关实现。基于多个Kubernetes集群的原型实现验证了所提设计的有效性。实验结果表明，相较于手动及声明式基线方法，该架构在可变工作负载下可实现高达42%的政策漂移降低、31%的配置传播时间改善，并保持p95延迟开销持续低于6%。这些结果表明，具备治理感知能力的意图驱动网关编排为安全、一致且性能可预测的云原生平台提供了可扩展且可靠的基础。