Source: containerjournal.com
Datawire this week launched Ambassador Edge Stack 1.0, which combines an open source application programming interface (API) gateway optimized for Kubernetes with a Level-7 load balancer, Kubernetes Ingress controllers, monitoring capabilities and a developer portal into a single platform.
Company CEO Richard Li says Ambassador Edge Stack 1.0 enables IT organizations to provision these tools in a few minutes rather than having to configure each separately.
Ambassador Edge Stack 1.0 also advances best DevOps practices because, via that portal, developers can apply security, resilience and traffic management policies to the services they develop on their own.
Each of those services can be secured using an automatic HTTPS configuration capability that supports ACME protocols, OAuth/OpenID Connect authentication, rate limiting and fine-grained access controls.
Developers can also configure automatic retries, timeouts and circuit breakers for their APIs, in addition to accessing an auto-updated API catalog and API documentation generated from a Swagger/OpenAPI specification.
Traffic management controls such as traffic shadowing, canary routing and cross-origin resource sharing can also be applied across a wide variety of protocols including TCP, HTTP/1.x, HTTP/2, gRPC, gRPC-Web and WebSockets traffic.
Finally, Ambassador Edge Stack 1.0 provides native support for distributed tracing, metrics collection and logging.
By bringing all these capabilities into a single platform, Li says Datawire is enabling organizations to reduce costs and operational overhead.
Kubernetes clusters require a different type of gateway than most organizations use today to manage APIs within a monolithic application environment, Li says. Microservices in Kubernetes environments require a gateway that makes it easier to create APIs at scale as microservices are developed and reduces latency by using a stateless architecture that is integrated natively with Kubernetes APIs. Ambassador Edge Stack 1.0 is also tightly integrated with the open source Envoy proxy server for easier deployment on-premises or in a cloud computing environment, he adds.
It’s not clear who within an IT organization will take care of API gateways today and in the future. However, Li says that as microservices continues to mature, a separation of duties between developers and IT operations teams is becoming clear. IT operations teams can use Ambassador Edge Stack 1.0 to provide developers access to a graphical user interface (GUI) to apply policies and controls to the APIs and services they develop.
Longer term, Datawire will use the Ambassador Edge Stack 1.0 platform to deliver additional services in a way that is streamlined alongside Kubernetes clusters.
It’s too early to say to what degree the rise of Kubernetes will force organizations to rethink the way they manage and secure APIs. However, as the number of microservices in any of those environments increases, it’s apparent the number of APIs being dynamically generated may require a different approach.
Ambassador Edge Stack is available for free as part of Datawire’s early access program. It’s scheduled to be generally available later this month in both free Community and Enterprise editions.
