Ambassador Labs Brings Order to Cloud-Native Toolchains
Ambassador Labs today at the KubeCon + CloudNative Con Europe 2021 conference unveiled a control plane that makes it simpler for development teams to centralize the management of the toolchain employed to build cloud-native applications.
Ambassador Labs’ CEO Richard Li says the Ambassador Developer Control Plane (DCP) also makes it simpler for development teams to add and replace tools within any toolchain they construct.
Ambassador DCP is built on top of open source components that include Envoy proxy software, the Argo continuous delivery platform, the emissary-ingress application programming interface (API) gateway and Telepresence traffic management software for microservices. All four of the components are being advanced under the auspices of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, with Ambassador Labs having contributed emissary-ingress and Telepresence.
Li says Ambassador DCP aggregates those platforms to enable developers to quickly set up a development environment and then instantly code and test locally against remote services and data stores. Developers can also share those development environments to foster collaboration, notes Li, and more easily build canary releases to incrementally roll out updates, he adds.
In addition to being able to discover services more easily in their application environments, Li notes developers can employ an Edge Stack platform, based on Envoy and emissary-ingress, to observe and optimize traffic to their services.
Organizations that embrace DevOps best practices are perennially trying to balance the desire of developers to employ any tool they see fit and the need to centralize the management of application development environments. That issue has become even more critical in the wake of recent high-profile attacks against software supply chains. The average site reliability engineer (SRE) is being asked to manage a wide range of developer environments without a platform that enables them to orchestrate which developers are accessing what tools and services at any given time, notes Li.
In addition, all that complexity makes it difficult to onboard new developers that now spend weeks just trying to understand what services and tools are available to them, adds Li. Ambassador DCP significantly reduces the time it takes to make new developers productive, says Li.
It’s not clear to what degree the rise of microservices will cause organizations to revisit their application development and deployment strategies. Many organizations are now trying to extend existing DevOps processes that revolve around continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platforms to Kubernetes environments. Others are reevaluating those processes as it becomes more apparent that building and deploying microservices-based applications is fundamentally different.
Ambassador Labs is betting that organizations that do decide to reengineer those process will look for a platform that provides as much control as possible, without necessarily sacrificing flexibility.
Regardless of what platform is employed, application development is becoming more complex. The applications being deployed may be more resilient and easier to update once they are deployed, but the processes required to build and deploy microservices-based applications that have lots of dependencies are clearly still evolving.
