Traefik Labs, HashiCorp Make Cloud-Native Apps More Accessible
Traefik Labs this week announced it has integrated its namkesake open source proxy software with the open source Nomad container orchestration platform created by HashiCorp.
Nomad is designed to appeal to development teams that prefer an easier approach to orchestrating a small number of containers than, for example, Kubernetes provides.
Manuel Zapf, a product manager for Traefik Labs, said Traefik is similarly designed to appeal to development teams that require proxy software that is simple to deploy.
The integration between Traefik and Nomad eliminates the need to manually configure ingress for third-party tools that integrate with Nomad, he added.
Traefik Proxy provides load balancing, orchestrator ingress and east-west service communication in addition to providing an application programming interface (API) gateway. It also enables service discovery, dynamic configuration, load balancing, rate-limiting, circuit-breakers, mirroring, authentication and routing automation as the proxy software intercepts and routes every incoming request to the corresponding backend services.
It also uses service discovery to configure itself dynamically in a way that makes it simpler to employ in a microservices-based application environment. All major protocols are supported in addition to providing a secure socket layer (SSL) termination capability that can be used to generate certificates.
There are large numbers of development teams that simply don’t have the resources required to deploy complex software infrastructure, notes Zapf. The integration of Traefik Proxy and Nomad provides a combination of tools that don’t require a dedicated backend IT team to manage, he adds.
In addition to Traefik Proxy, Traefik Labs also provides a service mesh based on its proxy software in addition to its Traefik Pilot platform for managing multiple instances of Traefik Proxy.
As proxy software, Traefik Proxy can be integrated with other container orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes. It’s not unusual for some organizations to employ multiple container orchestration platforms based on the preferences of their development teams and the relative maturity of their cloud/native environment at the time when their application was first constructed.
It’s not clear to what degree developers may drive a simplicity movement across those cloud-native application environments. Today it’s estimated there are about 7.5 million developers that build applications on top of cloud-native infrastructure such as Kubernetes. However, there are more than 11 million developers building applications using containers, so there is a significant percentage of existing container application developers that have yet to embrace Kubernetes.
In addition, there are roughly 50 million developers in total, so the bulk of the application developer community has yet to transition to developing cloud-native applications. Most of those developers rely on frameworks that simplify development by abstracting away as much of the underlying infrastructure complexity as possible.
One way or another, building and maintaining cloud-native applications will get simpler in the months and years ahead. The only issue that remains to be resolved is whether that will be achieved using simpler tools or frameworks that aggregate all those tools, making it simple enough for the average developer to build a modern cloud-native application.
