Case Study: Ticketmaster International
About Ticketmaster
I’m Paris Apostolopoulos, the Lead Software Engineer at Ticketmaster International. I’m a co-founder of the Greek Java User Group and currently work in London. Ticketmaster International represents Ticketmaster in all countries outside of North America.
What was your pre-Ambassador API Gateway strategy?
Before using Ambassador Edge Stack API Gateway, we’ve been using Kubernetes for almost three years and started organically. We started with a small number of services in Kubernetes, exposed through Amazon Elastic Load Balancers (ELB). As we started deploying more services, we started running more and more ELBs which were very complex and expensive.
We tried using native Ingress, but found it unnecessarily complex and difficult to use compared to many Kubernetes. In researching Kubernetes ingress, we came across this overview of Kubernetes ingress, which led us to Ambassador.
Why did you choose Ambassador?
We found Ambassador really easy to use. While we knew all about Envoy Proxy and Istio, we wanted to keep things simple as we were a small team. We managed to spin up Ambassador and have it proxy all of our internal services in a few hours. We also liked the flexibility to deploy your annotations — you could deploy it with Kubernetes services, or centralize the configuration in a single file.
We started using Ambassador in the 0.40 series and now run the latest Ambassador. We use Ambassador as the API Gateway for all our internally facing APIs.
How do you use Ambassador?
We have a dedicated repository for Ambassador configuration that is built around a small Helm chart. When an application developer deploys a new service, the developer updates the Helm chart with the necessary Ambassador configuration. Our CI system then runs and installs the updated Helm chart onto the cluster.
Benefits of adopting Ambassador
Ambassador is a great productivity tool and provides a single reference point for all of our services. We’ve also saved a lot of money and complexity since we’ve eliminated many of our ELBs. Ambassador has been very stable and robust to our needs.
