Spring Ambassador Fest 2021: Coding, Shipping, and Running Kubernetes Applications

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Ambassador Labs

4 min readMay 21, 2021

A few weeks ago we wrapped up our second ever Ambassador Fest virtual meetup which ran alongside KubeCon EU. It was great to connect with our community virtually, talk with some of our friends and partners in the ecosystem, and provide a place where both we and they could share the work we’ve been up to.

The recordings for all sessions are now available on our YouTube Channel, but in case you missed the live event, here are some of the highlights from the week.

Introducing the Ambassador Developer Control Plane

During his Keynote session on Wednesday, our CEO, Richard Li unveiled our big announcement — the Ambassador Developer Control Plane.

For application developers, learning Kubernetes means learning about many new tools. Richard talked about the concept of tool sprawl within the CNCF landscape and explained the challenges that application developers face when trying to integrate the many tools they need to manage when building Kubernetes-based applications. To address this problem he introduced the Ambassador Developer Control Plane. This enables developers to control and configure the entire cloud development loop with the goal of shipping software faster. Richard argued that the CNCF landscape of tooling is the foundation for any modern developer control plane.

Since the announcement at Ambassador Fest, the Ambassador Developer Control Plane has been discussed on The New Stack, InfoQ, Container Journal, and more!

The DCP aims to simplify the code-ship-run workflow by providing a single interface to manage the necessary tools. Integrated within the control plane are a number of CNCF projects with other common tooling such as GitHub, GitLab, DataDog, Docker, and Jenkins. — Matt Campbell, InfoQ

At the end of the week, Daniel Bryant gave a closing keynote on how to get started implementing a Developer Control Plane within your organization.

The key takeaway from this session was that you don’t need to adopt a developer control plane all at once. As an application developer you should start by addressing the problem that impacts you the most directly — which is typically coding locally. For this reason, Daniel recommended using Telepresence for local development in Kubernetes. Once you speed up your inner development loop with Telepresence it’s easy to integrate other tools in your stack that help you ship and run Kubernetes services. We covered many of these tools, such as CI/CD pipelines, dashboards, and observability standards and implementations in other Ambassador Fest sessions.

Code + Ship: Easily Build and Release Code

When teams migrate to Kubernetes, the requirements for your local development environment change. At Ambassador Fest this year, we covered several development challenges associated with adopting Kubernetes, as well as some proposed solutions. If this is a challenge you’ve faced, check out the following talks:

Run: Understand Your Services and Keep Them Operational 24/7

Once you’ve built your new services and shipped them to production with Kubernetes, you need to get traffic routed to them via an ingress. Additionally, you want to make sure you have observability tooling configured correctly to ensure that you’ll be alerted if your end users’ experience is degraded or your services misbehave. Traditionally, these concerns are left to the operations team, but in a cloud native world developers need to have access and manage these tools as well. If you’re a developer worried about keeping your services running, the following talks will help you get started:

Thank You to Our Guest Speakers

Every year we look forward to the opportunity to connect with our friends in the CNCF Ecosystem and learn more about what they’re working on. We’d like to thank all of the guest speakers that participated in Ambassador Fest this year:

See You Soon!

We can’t wait to see you at our next Ambassador Fest! To be notified when the next event is announced you can sign up for updates here. Otherwise, you can always reach us and our awesome community members in our Slack Channel or on Twitter. Talk to you soon!