KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2019

The Envoy proxy is fast becoming ubiquitous as the universal data plane API for cloud-native networking and communications. However, the power of Envoy comes at the cost of configuration complexity. In this talk, I’ll discuss what we learned from designing and implementing the Ambassador edge control plane for Envoy, built around the Kubernetes API and Envoy’s v2 configuration. I’ll talk about the evolution of Ambassador from a simple Envoy configuration engine built around Jinja2 templates and variable substitution to the more sophisticated, multi-pass, compiler-type architecture that is in use today. I’ll also discuss how engineers today are using Ambassador, the community that has developed around this project, and where we see the requirements and technology evolving.