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

February 8, 2019

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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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Rate Limiting at the Edge

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

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