Traefik Labs Cloud Service Simplifies Cloud-Native Networking
Traefik Labs has made a cloud service generally available through which IT teams can network Kubernetes clusters at scale.
Traefik Labs CEO Emile Vauge says Traefik Hub employs a lightweight open source agent, known as a Hub, that automatically discovers services connected to either an instance of the open source Traefik or NGINX Community Edition proxy software. In effect, Traefik Hub provides the centralized control plane required to network Kubernetes clusters without requiring IT teams to deploy container sidecars to run networking software, he notes.
In addition to enabling containers to more easily be networked via secure encrypted tunnels and direct private connections, Traefik Hub also automates HTTPS certificate management.
Finally, Traefik Hub supports OpenID Connect (OIDC), JSON Web Tokens (JWTs), Basic Auth and Digest Auth to secure access to network connections.
Networking is becoming a bigger challenge as more organizations discover they are now managing fleets of Kubernetes clusters running services that need to be interconnected. Rather than deploying that networking overlay themselves, Traefik Labs is making a case for a cloud service that doesn’t require a lot of dedicated expertise to securely network multiple Kubernetes clusters together once agent software is deployed on each node. That capability is especially critical as more instances of Kubernetes clusters are deployed in edge computing environments that are geographically distributed.
Traefik Labs would, of course, prefer organizations employ Traefik Proxy to provide the load balancing, orchestrator ingress, east-west service communications and application programming interface (API) gateway services via Traefik Cloud. The proxy software developed by Traefik Labs provides service discovery, dynamic configuration, load balancing, rate-limiting, circuit-breakers, mirroring, authentication and routing automation capabilities. However, there are lot more instances of NGINX installed, so Traefik decided to add support for other proxy software, Vauge says.
While the bulk of applications running in production environments are monolithic, the percentage of cloud-native applications deployed continues to rise. As that transition occurs, the number of IT teams converging compute, storage and networking management on Kubernetes clusters will also increase. It’s not clear how that convergence will impact job roles within IT organizations, but development teams that are deploying modern applications don’t want to wait days for a network connection to be provisioned. In time, it’s apparent that network operations will become an extension of a larger DevOps workflow when the control plane for accessing those services is easily accessible via the cloud.
In theory, at least, Kubernetes is providing the foundation for the next era of hybrid cloud computing as clusters are deployed across multiple clouds and on-premises IT environments. The challenge will be finding a way to integrate those clusters across a network overlay that enables distributed applications and services to be discovered, updated, secured and integrated.
In the meantime, IT organizations will have to decide if they will continue to require a dedicated network operations team or if the time has come to finally integrate that function into the processes used to manage the rest of the IT infrastructure environment.
