Situational Awareness: Boost Your Cloud Native Developer Productivity
Automated configuration analysis & developer portal now available in Ambassador Developer Control Plane (DCP)
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Declarative management of API gateways is de rigeur today, but the Ambassador API Gateway (now Emissary-Ingress) pioneered this concept with its initial release in 2017. By extending the Kubernetes Resource Model, Ambassador enabled a fundamentally different workflow from the REST or UI-centric management strategies of the day. This workflow, over time, has come to be known as GitOps. While the GitOps workflow has been transformative for accelerating velocity, we’ve also found that developers struggle to context switch between coding, shipping, and running code.
Today, we’re announcing a number of new enhancements to Ambassador Developer Control Plane (DCP), which boosts your situational awareness, reducing the cost of context switching. We’ve also thought carefully about how you want to interact with DCP, designing it to be a sidekick that augments your existing workflow instead of replacing it.
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In the animation above, I’m opening a pull request against my repository to change my Emissary configuration. The DCP detects the change and adds a comment to the change that tells me what will happen when I merge the PR into your main deployment branch.
Situational Awareness
A developer’s situational awareness needs to span all phases of the cloud-native software development lifecycle, from development to production. The DCP today already provides a holistic view of your services across all your environments — development, staging, and production. Building on this core foundation, we’ve added several new capabilities to further improve your situational awareness, letting you code, ship, and run your services faster:
- Automated Configuration Analysis. As noted above, DCP now analyzes configuration changes, and will post comments on the implications of your change before you merge into main.
- Developer Portal. DCP now renders Swagger and Open API specification API documentation directly into the service details page.
Automated configuration analysis
Using CRDs, different teams of developers can independently manage different routes in Emissary-Ingress. One of the major challenges of this approach, however, is that developers do not always have the context of their changes. For example, a developer may inadvertently overwrite the route to another service. Now, a pull request against the repository that changes Emissary-Ingress CRDs will automatically notify the Developer Control Plane. DCP analyzes the pull request, and posts its analysis as a comment on the pull request. Now, developers can make configuration changes to DCP with confidence!
Developer Portal
Our on-premise developer portal has seen rapid adoption, with users using the developer portal to share their API documentation with end users. Now, with DCP, this information is part of the core Service Details page. Now, a developer can log into DCP and get a unified, real-time view of their services across environments — and then view the API documentation of the deployed service alongside the runtime information for a service.
New Kubernetes Quickstarts — No Cluster? No Problem!
It’s great to have situational awareness, but Kubernetes adoption is a team sport. From helping thousands of organizations along their Kubernetes adoption journey we’ve found that the migration and adoption of new cloud native tools is often led by a small group of experts, and the individual developers are left behind in the experimentation phases.
Today, we’re excited to announce new get started experiences across the cloud native development lifecycle that enables developers to see the developer control plane in action in a real Kubernetes cluster in less than 5 minutes without impacting your production environments.
Get started today:
- Code locally against a remote Kubernetes cluster with Telepresence
- Ship a canary release of your Kubernetes service with Argo
To manage your services across environments with the Developer Control Plane, create a free cloud account today!