2020: A Year in Review

Kate Packard
Ambassador Labs
Published in
4 min readJan 8, 2021

2020 is officially behind us, and while 2020 certainly had its lows, there are definitely a few highs that we’d be remiss not to mention and take the chance to celebrate with our incredible community.

Product Launches and Feature Releases

Ambassador Edge Stack

Last January, we released the Ambassador Edge Stack 1.0. Over the course of the year, we released 10 new versions of Ambassador with many exciting features, including:

  • More efficient installation paths
  • More robust OAuth support
  • Improvements to the Developer Portal & Developer Onboarding, both internal and external
  • Robust scaling with support for installations with large quantities of mappings
  • Support for the new Kubernetes 1.18 ingress specifications
  • Our Delivery Acceleration module and Micro CD pipeline, which includes support for other CI/CD tools, such as Jenkins X

This week, we released Ambassador 1.10.0 (our first feature release of the new year!) which now supports highly scalable rate limiting and improved redirects that are both flexible and configurable.

K8s Initializer for Spinning Up Custom-Configured Kubernetes Playgrounds

Additionally, we launched the K8s Initializer (because we hate writing YAML as much as the next person). We wanted to make sure that no one ever had to stress about writing YAML again, so we created a free tool for easily spinning up Kubernetes playground environments in order to evaluate new cloud native technologies. The K8s Initializer supports Keycloak, Knative, Prometheus, Lightstep, OpenTelemetry, and many other popular cloud native tools. Check it out!

Building Our Team and the Ambassador Community

This year, we were fortunate to raise $18M in Series B funding with Insight Partners, which enabled us to nearly double our team in order to move faster together. Though our team hasn’t been together in person since March, we’ve successfully shifted to a 100% remote workflow, and our team is spread out across North America and Europe as a result. We’re looking forward to growing our team even more in 2021, and you could be a part of it! Check out our careers page for more info.

Though we couldn’t hang out with the Ambassador community in-person as much as we would have liked this year, we were able to connect at virtual conferences such as All Day DevOps, KubeCon, and QCon.

We also hosted the first-ever Ambassador Fest, an online meetup for developers to connect with our team and with each other or attend a series of lightning talks, demos, and AMAs.

Our Open Source community grew (and is still growing), with more than 4,500 community users chatting about their use cases and sharing their favorite ways to use Ambassador products in our community Slack. We were excited to welcome Monday.com, ComplyAdvantage, Aera Technology, and many more to the enterprise community as well.

We were humbled to win a few awards, including the Tech Trailblazers Developer Trailblazer Award, the Gold 2020 IT World Award, the People’s Choice Stevie Award for Favorite New API Management Solution, and the Silver Stevie Award for Best API Management Solution in the 2020 American Business Awards.

Collaborating within the Cloud Native Ecosystem

2020 brought us some pretty cool partnerships as well, including OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Keycloak, Argo, HashiCorp, and Knative. These partnerships mean that the K8s Initializer can meet your needs, whatever they might be.

Creating Resources to Support Your Kubernetes Projects

We published a lot of content this year. These were your favorites:

  1. Step-by-Step Centralized Authentication for Kubernetes with Keycloak and the Ambassador Edge Stack
  2. externalTrafficPolicy=local on Kubernetes
  3. Experiment with New Tools in Your Own Kubernetes Playground
  4. Announcing Ambassador API Gateway & Edge Stack 1.0 General Availability
  5. Deploying the Ambassador Edge Stack as an Ingress Controller for Kubernetes with TLS

Looking Towards 2021

As we wrap up our reflection on the year we want to say a big thank you to our entire community: our customers, Ambassadors, OSS users, Slack community, and everyone else. We couldn’t do it without you!

We’ve got big plans for 2021, including new products, new features, and sharing more of our collective learnings and experience. We’re always keen to receive feedback, and so please swing by our blog, YouTube channel, and Slack, and keep an eye out for us at meetups and events.

As the cloud native ecosystem continues to expand and more and more teams adopt Kubernetes we realize that providing opinionated guidance and best practices is vital. Users of our tooling and platforms want to know how they can effectively deliver new products and features to their end users, and do so rapidly, reliably, and sustainably.

In the grander themes of delivering value with speed and safety, we’re excited about working more on cloud migrations, continuous delivery best practices, GitOps, understandability and observability, and security.

If you want to know more, or you want to get involved with the Ambassador community, please reach out!

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Published in Ambassador Labs

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