K8S INITIALIZER

Build & Share Kubernetes Playgrounds with the K8s Initializer 1.0

Evaluate CNCF-hosted tools in production-like environments

Today, we’re excited to announce the general availability of the K8s Initializer 1.0. The K8s Initializer is a self-service web interface designed to help developers building applications on Kubernetes with evaluating new cloud native tools in an environment that mirrors production.

The K8s Initializer 1.0 release includes capabilities to deploy and configure tooling from across many areas of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Landscape including observability and continuous delivery. To date the K8s Initializer offers support for 6 CNCF-hosted tools, including:

• Kubernetes
• Envoy (through the Ambassador Edge Stack)
• OpenTelemetry
• Prometheus
• Jaeger
• ArgoCD

Over 70 Million Lines (and Counting) of YAML Automatically Generated!

Users of the K8s Initializer answer a series of simple configuration questions via the web interface, click the “Review and Install” button, and the corresponding YAML required to initialize their cluster is automatically generated and made available for download.

Since launching in late July, the K8s Initializer has generated more than 70M lines of YAML for 1000s of custom configurations. The general availability release of the K8s Initializer has been built based on the feedback from the 1000s of users that have generated custom configurations so far.

Support for Configuring Tools Across the CNCF Landscape

When we initially built the K8s Initializer, we had a goal of making it easy for members of the Ambassador community to be able to quickly and easily generate the YAML they needed in order to overcome challenging cloud-specific networking K8s configuration and integrate Ambassador with other tools in their cloud native tech stack. Over time, we realized that generating configuration was a common problem across all areas of the K8s tech stack, not just Ingress.

As a result, we collaborated with our community and set out to add support for tools that they had faced challenges with configuring in the past. In particular we focused on tools where integration with an ingress controller wasn’t particularly straightforward. With this in mind we added support for ArgoCD for continuous delivery, and Keycloak for authentication.

Enabling Developers to Easily Evaluate Future Tech: OpenTelemetry and Knative

In our continued work with the community, we knew many of our users were in the process of setting up observability or evaluating new tools for metrics and distributed tracing. Accordingly, we launched the Initializer with built-in support for Prometheus, and since then we have added support for Jaeger, the OpenTelemetry collector, and Lightstep for distributed tracing.

The OpenTelemetry collector is especially interesting because it makes it easy for us to add support for more tools that support the OpenTelemetry specification in the future.

Finally, we had learned from our community that integrating serverless tools with observability was particularly challenging given the highly distributed and ephemeral nature of serverless architectures. Once we had upgraded all of our observability functionality, the voice of the serverless community grew so strong that adding support for Knative appeared to be a no-brainer in order to help address this use case.

If there is a tool that you’d like to see supported by the K8s Initializer drop us a line on twitter @ambassadorlabs or join the #k8s-initializer channel on our Community slack.

Playgrounds Are More Fun With Friends — Share Your Configurations with your Team

Testing out new tools is more exciting when you can easily share your proof-of-concept with your teammates and managers. The K8s Initializer now supports a sample application that you can easily configure and deploy into your cluster to show the configurations you’ve generated working together.

Additionally, if you don’t have access to a TLS-enabled domain, you can ask the K8s Initializer to generate a custom free edgstack.me domain for you. Then, you can access the sample application at this URL and share it with your team.

Safely Experiment with New Technologies Using the K8s Initializer Today

The K8s Initializer is available for you to try today, just visit app.getambassador.io/initializer! If you’re attending KubeCon this week and want to test out a new tool, use the Initializer to help you spin up a Kubernetes playground that looks like your production environment in just a few clicks!