PRODUCT RELEASE

Ambassador Edge Stack 1.0.0-ea1 Release Notes

Ambassador Edge Stack 1.0 Early Access 1 is available

We’re starting the Early Access period for Ambassador Edge Stack 1.0, a major milestone in Ambassador’s life. The official announcement is available here.

We’ll be writing quite a bit more about why we created Ambassador Edge Stack, but for now, here’re the nuts and bolts of the 1.0.0-ea1 release.

Early Access

First, and most importantly, this is an Early Access release. We’ve spent a lot of time building and testing it, and we feel good about the testing to date, but please don’t rush out and upgrade your entire production cluster this afternoon! Instead, try things out, let us know how they go, and generally take it slow. We’ll be communicating frequently during the Early Access period about what we’re hearing and what we’ve made better, and we welcome you on the Datawire Slack as well.

Second, your existing Ambassador installations should continue to work with Ambassador Edge Stack. We hope you’ll read the migration documentation (and tweak your RBAC and update your CRDs to take full advantage of Ambassador Edge Stack!), but Ambassador Edge Stack is still Ambassador and you shouldn’t need to rewrite your configurations or any such madness.

New Features

Ambassador Edge Stack brings some major change to the table:

• Ambassador Edge Stack includes all the features that used to be part of Ambassador Pro, and offers a free community license to use them — and yes, the core is still completely open-source, and you’re still welcome to build your own and run it however you like.
• The new Host CRD provides a simple way to let Ambassador know what domain names it should expect to be handling. In turn, this enables Automatic HTTPS, where Ambassador can use the information in Host CRDs to manage TLS certificates for you with ACME.
• Ambassador Edge Stack also automatically manages redirection from HTTP to HTTPS by default. (You can turn this off, but certs are easy enough now that there’s almost no point.)
• There’s the shiny new Edge Policy Console UI (and although our old diagnostic UI is being retired, the underlying JSON is still available and backward-compatible).
• Mappings now get Status updates so you can get a bit more information about when things become active.
• All of Ambassador’s resources have been updated to apiVersion: getambassador.io/v2 for consistency in the feature sets merged from Ambassador and Ambassador Pro.
• There’s new machinery for building and testing which have proven quite a bit faster than in the past. (Some of you may have seen my talk at KubeCon in San Diego about the new test machinery, in fact.) We’ll be writing more about these individually: for now, joining in on Slack is a great idea if you want to get your hands dirty here.
• Ambassador Edge Stack also includes all the security fixes and features from Ambassador 0.86.0. Like 0.86, Ambassador Edge Stack 1.0.0-ea1 is built over Envoy Proxy 1.12.2 plus our Datawire patches.
• We’ve also rolled in some bugfixes. CORS now happens before rate limiting. The reconfiguration engine is better protected from exceptions caused by broken inputs. Various internals have been made more consistent. These are all pretty small things, but they should help smooth the experience for everyone.

One Removal

There is one thing we removed from Ambassador Edge Stack: support for the pb.lyft.ratelimit.RateLimitService gRPC protocol, which was replaced by envoy.service.ratelimit.v2.RateLimitService quite some time ago and deprecated in Ambassador shortly thereafter. The two are identical except for their names, and all the Ambassador-compatible rate limiting services we know of have supported both protocols for nearly that entire time.

Looking Ahead

Ambassador Edge Stack represents a lot of work by all of Datawire. It’s been crunch time for us for the last several weeks, and we’re all really looking forward to getting this release out the door. Thanks for joining us, and please let us know how things go! Software gets better with feedback, and we’re looking forward to yours. There’s no way we’d be here without Ambassador’s users and contributors — many, many thanks!

Installing 1.0.0-ea1

Ambassador Edge Stack 1.0.0-ea1 is available with the Docker tag quay.io/datawire/aes:1.0.0-ea1. We recommend that you read and follow the migration instructions, to make it easier to verify that everything is working for you.

Get Involved

If you run into any problems with the update, please open an issue or join our Slack for some help.

And, if Ambassador is working well for you, we’d love to hear about it. Drop us a line in the comments below, or @getambassadorio on Twitter.