Datawire last week announced the release of the Ambassador Edge Stack 1.0. Available as part of an early access program, the Ambassador Edge Stack is an integrated edge solution that empowers developer teams to rapidly configure the edge services required to build, deliver, and scale their applications running in Kubernetes. Datawire is the company behind Ambassador, the open source Kubernetes-native API gateway built on top of Envoy, and Telepresence, a CNCF-hosted tool enabling programmers to develop locally while connecting a service to a remote Kubernetes cluster.
The “edge”, a heavily overloaded term in software today, here describes the edge of a Kubernetes cluster, or the implicit boundary over which microservices are exposed to users outside the organization. Promising a comprehensive developer experience, the platform helps developers directly manage policies, implement a variety of security needs, facilitate troubleshooting through observability features, and configure traffic management (to include TCP, HTTP, gRPC, & WebSocket). The Ambassador Edge Stack replaces the need for a separate layer 7 load balancer, API gateway, Kubernetes ingress controller, and developer portal.
"The set of policy options for externally exposed microservices has extended well beyond API protocol and security choices to include options like automatic retries, timeouts, rate limits, canary testing, and the number of instances", said Richard Li, CEO of Datawire. "As a result, developers are likely to make one or more edge changes with each release. The Ambassador Edge Stack provides developers with an easy-to-use interface to change any edge policy so they can develop, test, and execute with confidence, while freeing the platform team to play a more strategic role."
In a press release announcing the Ambassador Edge Stack, the company described the modern cloud native application release impediment as one of the big reasons for the creation of the stack. Organizations are moving en masse to adopt Kubernetes as a way to boost developer productivity and increase the release velocity of their software projects. Leveraging microservices, teams are iterating quickly and releasing services at varying velocities. In these releases, teams define security, resilience, and traffic management policies for their services. However, the actual implementation of these definitions typically relies on an operations team. As teams expand, features increase, and velocity continues to climb, the operation’s team backlog can also balloon, hurting the overall velocity of the system.
The goal of Ambassador Edge Stack is to address this release impediment and eliminate the operation team's backlog by giving developers the power to implement (not just specify) the policy changes for their feature. Some of the core capabilities of the Ambassador Edge Stack includes:
- Edge Policy Console. Configure, manage, and visualize edge policies via a graphical interface.
- Easy-to-use security. Secure microservices with automatic HTTPS configuration via integrated ACME support, OAuth/OpenID Connect integration, rate limiting, and fine-grained access control.
- Availability. Ensure microservice availability by configuring resilience strategies such as automatic retries, timeouts, circuit breakers, and rate limiting.
- Developer-onboarding. Accelerate developer onboarding with an auto-updated API catalog, a customizable developer portal, and API documentation generated from Swagger/OpenAPI.
- Observability. Facilitate troubleshooting via native Envoy-based support for distributing tracing, metrics collection, and logging.
- Modern traffic management. Configure traffic routing across a wide variety of protocols including TCP, HTTP/1.x, HTTP/2, gRPC, gRPC-Web, and WebSockets. Utilize traffic management controls, including traffic shadowing, canary routing, cross-origin and resource sharing.
The Ambassador Edge Stack is freely available today as part of their early access program. Going forward, the stack will be available in both a free community edition and an enterprise edition. To learn more about the Ambassador Edge Stack, visit the early access page.
