DEVOPSdigest

Ambassador Labs announced a host of new capabilities available in Ambassador Cloud that make it easier for organizations to adopt Kubernetes and support developer productivity in how they code, test, ship and run workflows across these high scale environments.

Ambassador Edge Stack, the company’s flagship API gateway, now contains a number of performance updates, beneficial to all users and especially large scale deployments, and also includes active health checking features that give developers more control of the overall resilience and scalability of services.

Telepresence is now fully integrated with Ambassador Cloud Service Catalog, delivering real-time visibility into workflow performance and includes a new “team mode” to ease the developer onboarding process across large organizations.

“We see organizations struggle to manage their Kubernetes environments, particularly developers who not only have taken on more ownership of the full app dev lifecycle, but also collaborate with dev teams across the business to support fast dev cycles,” said Richard Li, Chief Product Officer and co-founder at Ambassador Labs. “We long ago saw the advantage Kubernetes brings to organizations and importantly, the opportunity it provides developers managing apps across these high-scale environments. The capabilities now available in Ambassador Cloud reinforce our commitment to both Kubernetes experts and non-Kubernetes experts, the individual developer and developer teams, and significantly improve efficiencies in managing their entire dev environment.”

Kubernetes continues to be embraced by large enterprises but has room for improved developer experience on its path to maturity. As adoption expands with organizational quests to support continuous development cycles, it’s more important than ever that developers have the necessary tools to manage this pace of adoption, and address workflow configuration risks inadvertently brought on by others within the organization. The newest release of Ambassador Edge Stack and Telepresence addresses these challenges and much more.

Key features and benefits of Ambassador Edge Stack include:

- New Active Health Checks. New support for active health checks - which are configurable based on an organization’s needs - ensure that if an HTTP request to the upstream service does not respond, the service is removed from the load balancing tool until it responds to a subsequent health check. This complements the existing passive health checks of Edge Stack, and provides developers and operations teams with more control when designing and implementing resilient systems.

- New External Filter Metrics. Auto collection of telemetry for filters of type External, which includes responses approved/denied, response codes and configuration and connection errors. Operations team will be able to observe key filter SLIs and automate actions based on these metrics.

- Redis Performance Improvements. A number of improvements to how Redis is called, such as improved caching and the use of async writes, will lead to increased overall performance. Users who now leverage the new Filter Metrics will see better performance and scalability, particularly in high workloads.

Key features and benefits of Telepresence include:

- New Team Mode. To simplify the user experience and available on demand with just a click, a new “team mode” changes the default intercept type from global to personal intercepts. This makes onboarding additional developers easier and allows more than one developer to intercept the same service, fueling easier sharing of work-in-progress via secure preview URLs.

- New Service Catalog integration. Suited for both the individual developer and developer teams, users get a holistic view of all Kubernetes services across all clusters. Disparate developer teams have a single pane of glass view to manage their services across all remote clusters.

- New compatibility for MicroK8s and Minikube. This provides increased support for using additional remote and local Kubernetes implementations, allowing teams to expand the benefits of using Telepresence across additional clusters with no additional configuration required.