Ambassador Labs Gives Devs More Kubernetes Control
Ambassador Labs this week unveiled a control plane that provides developers with the ability to programmatically orchestrate all the elements of a Kubernetes environment.
Richard Li, Ambassador Labs’ CEO, says version 1.0 of the Ambassador Developer Control Plane (DCP) provides developers with the framework they require to assume more responsibility for managing Kubernetes environments on an end-to-end basis.
In theory, developers are gaining more control over IT environments as part of an overall shift left of responsibility for managing applications after they have been deployed in production environments. In practice, Li notes that doesn’t happen as often as it should simply because the management tools for the infrastructure on which an application is deployed were designed to be used by IT operations teams.
Ambassador DCP provides an abstraction layer above those tools that makes it possible for developers to programmatically manage the entire IT environment through user interfaces accessed via a managed service provided by Ambassador Labs, says Li. That service integrates with a service catalog that unifies the entire software development life cycle (SDLC), adds Li.
In addition, Ambassador Labs is previewing support for Argo, an open source continuous delivery (CD) platform that is being advanced under the auspices of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). The edition of that DevOps platform will enable developers to more easily manage software development using GitOps best practices, notes Li.
Finally, Ambassador DCP also includes support for Telepresence, a tool for running a single Kubernetes service locally to debug it, and Emissary-ingress, an open source application programming interface (API) gateway that is also being advanced under the auspices of the CNCF.
As part of an effort to increase the overall size of the Kubernetes developer community, Ambassador Labs is also making available a free, 90-day Kubernetes education program. The program is divided into three month-long chapters that span the full app development life cycle. The company also created an Ambassador Community Advocate Program that seeks to recognize top Kubernetes experts for their activism and technical contributions within the Ambassador Labs developer community.
In general, it’s unclear just how much control over IT environments developers will assume. However, because of the prevalence of modern APIs within Kubernetes environments, the ability to unify the management of applications and infrastructure is much higher. That may prove to be especially critical as applications deployed across fleets of highly distributed Kubernetes clusters are deployed across a hybrid cloud computing environment.
Regardless of how much control any given developer wants to have over an IT environment, they will always have to balance how much time they want to spend writing code versus actually managing the IT environment. In many cases, developers are more focused on setting up the initial environment they need to have in place to build an application before turning over management tasks to an IT operations team once that application is deployed in a production environment. In other cases, a DevOps team led by developers is responsible for managing, securing and updating the entire application environment on an ongoing basis. The challenge is finding the right mix of management responsibilities based on the skill sets available within any organization.
