Faster Incident Response on Kubernetes

Introducing Ambassador Service Catalog: A single pane of glass for all your Kubernetes services & metadata, free for all users

Daniel Bryant
Ambassador Labs

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The ability to easily and completely understand your software system is vitally important, particularly when things are on fire at 3 AM and you’ve just been paged. You need to quickly establish your service dependencies, identify who owns each service involved within the Kubernetes cluster, and locate their communication channels.

This ability to understand systems applies equally during development time too. Especially when working within high performing teams that are building large numbers of microservices and deploying to a dynamic environment like Kubernetes.

Today we are pleased to share a deeper look into the brand new Ambassador Service Catalog, a one-stop shop to view all of your Kubernetes services’ information and metadata. Critically, the Service Catalog leverages Kubernetes annotations and this information is stored within your service config, so you don’t need an additional service registry.

We’re also making the Service Catalog free for all users — there are no restrictions on the number of developers accessing the catalog or the number of services registered.

When Things Are On Fire, You Need to Understand the System Quickly

During production incidents, do you find yourself trying to understand what dependencies your service has, which team owns each downstream service, or where to ask for help in Slack?

The Service Catalog provides a single location for you and your team to visit in order to see your entire Kubernetes service landscape. Simply install or connect your existing Edge Stack to Ambassador Cloud and instantly all of your services deployed within the associated Kubernetes cluster are visible through the web UI. Now you can easily and quickly understand all of your services and their dependencies.

Leverage Kubernetes Annotations

When we started to build the Service Catalog, we wanted to use Kubernetes as the source of truth. Kubernetes annotations provide a powerful way to add information about services, and interoperate with all of your existing tooling and workflow.

You can easily associate metadata with a Kubernetes service with the kubectl annotate command:

Or add annotations to your Kubernetes YAML, Kustomize template files, or Helm Charts and apply these using best practice GitOps tooling such as Argo CD.

And as you are writing Kubernetes standard annotations you can easily view the information via your existing tools, such as kubectl e.g. kubectl describe svc my-service.

High Fidelity Service Metadata for Your Team

Imagine being able to easily view in one place all the key metadata you require for each Kubernetes service. Imagine now being able to easily share this with your team, inviting them to view and participate in adding and updating service metadata.

Information about services can be added incrementally, with system visibility and understandability increasing with each additional annotation added to a service. Within just a few iterations of annotating your team has a high fidelity picture of your entire service landscape.

Everyone is well equipped to address any of the issues related to services that inevitably arise when dealing with an incident.

The answers to questions like “which team owns the upstream service that is being affected?”, “where is the incident dashboard for my service?”, and “which Slack channel should I ask questions about this dependency?” are easily found by looking into the Service Catalog.

Integrates With Your Existing Kubernetes Deployment Workflow

Ambassador Service Catalog synchronizes your Kubernetes services’ metadata regardless of how you are currently deploying your service configuration to your clusters: K8s YAML, Kustomize, Helm Charts, etc., are all supported. Your service deployment workflow remains unchanged. Simply install the Edge Stack into your cluster and connect this to your cloud account in order to view all of your services.

There is no additional service registry to deploy and maintain, and so there are no worries about compatibility and maintainability issues with solutions that store this service metadata outside of your Kubernetes config.

Get Started Today

The Service Catalog is 100% free, with no restrictions on the number of developers or services. Get started with Ambassador Cloud Service Catalog today by visiting a8r.io/catalog and signing up for your free cloud account today.

You can also join our Slack community to ask questions and get advice from other Ambassador users. See you there!

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DevRel and Technical GTM Leader | News/Podcasts @InfoQ | Web 1.0/2.0 coder, platform engineer, Java Champion, CS PhD | cloud, K8s, APIs, IPAs | learner/teacher