DEVOPSdigest

Datawire unveiled the new Ambassador Edge Stack 1.0, 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.

The Ambassador Edge Stack offers the most comprehensive set of capabilities to ensure the operation of secure and reliable microservices on Kubernetes through an intuitive, self-service delivery model, and is available for free today as part of our early access program.

Organizations are rapidly adopting Kubernetes to boost developer productivity and increase release velocity. Currently, businesses partition applications into microservices where each development team manages its code independently of one another. However, teams exposing services to end users often hit an impediment to faster release cycles. While developers can specify security, resilience, and traffic management policies for their services – one or more of which changes with each release – they typically rely on an operations team to implement those policy changes. And as microservices multiply and release cycles shrink, the backlog of change requests balloons, creating more and more work for the operations team.

Ambassador Edge Stack eliminates the request backlog by giving power to the developers to implement, and not just specify, policy changes for their microservice. It provides developer self-service access to the most comprehensive set of capabilities required at the edge – the implicit boundary over which microoservices are exposed to users outside the organization.

"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."

With the Ambassador Edge Stack, platform teams adopting Kubernetes can eliminate edge configuration as the impediment to release while simultaneously reducing operational overhead. It fills the Kubernetes-native tool gap with full application visibility support, and allows engineers to pick and choose the capabilities to best support their needs in order to release applications fast, more frequently and with the highest level of security. Notably, the Ambassador Edge Stack replaces a separate L7 load balancer, API Gateway, Kubernetes Ingress, and Developer Portal with a single, comprehensive solution that addresses the needs of a variety of microservice types.

Core capabilities of Ambassador Edge Stack include:

- Edge Policy Console. Easily configure, manage, and visualize edge policies with the ease-of-use and visibility of a graphical interface, all enabled by a seamless integration with the Kubernetes API.

- Easy-to-Use Security. Secure your microservices with automatic HTTPS configuration, with integrated ACME support, OAuth/OpenID Connect integration, rate limiting, and fine-grained access control.

- Availability. Ensure microservice availability with key 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 and improve applications faster with native support for distributing tracing, metrics collection, and logging.

- Modern Traffic management. Configure traffic across a wide variety of protocols including TCP, HTTP/1.x, HTTP/2, gRPC, gRPC-Web, and WebSockets traffic. Utilize traffic management controls including traffic shadowing, canary routing, cross-origin resource sharing, and more.

"The more microservices you have, the more you realize the need for platform teams to embrace a self-service model to managing edge policy due to the differing needs and release cycles of each microservice," said Steve Hendrick, Research Director, Enterprise Management Associates. "Datawire is at the forefront in easing the management of microservice applications design and implementation with the Ambassador Edge Stack. It gives developer teams the power to expose, secure and manage any microservice type to support frequent and fast release cycles."

The Ambassador Edge Stack is available for free today as part of the early access program, and will be generally available later this month in both free Community and Enterprise editions.