Ambassador: Building a Control Plane for an Envoy-Powered API Gateway on Kubernetes

Ambassador: Building a Control Plane for an Envoy-Powered API Gateway on Kubernetes

  • February 8, 2019
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Ambassador: Building a Control Plane for an Envoy-Powered API Gateway on Kubernetes

This article provides an insight into the creation of the Ambassador open source API gateway for Kubernetes, and discusses the technical challenges and lessons learned from building a developer-focused control plane for managing ingress or ‘edge’ traffic within microservice-based applications. Key Takeaways Developed by Datawire, Ambassador is an open source API gateway designed specifically for use with the Kubernetes container orchestration framework. At its core, Ambassador is a control plane tailored for edge/API configuration for managing the Envoy Proxy “data plane”.

Envoy itself is a cloud native Layer 7 proxy and communication bus used for handling “edge” ingress and service-to-service networking communication. This article provides an insight into the creation of Ambassador, and discusses the technical challenges and lessons learned from building a developer-focused control plane for managing ingress traffic within microservice-based applications that are deployed into a Kubernetes cluster. Migrating Ambassador to the Envoy v2 configuration and Aggregated Discovery Service (ADS) APIs was a long and difficult journey that required lots of architecture and design discussions, and plenty of coding, but early feedback from the community has been positive.

Source: infoq.com

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