FEATURE RELEASE

Stop losing sleep when developing Kubernetes applications

Service Catalog, Edge Stack 1.12 with Argo Rollouts support, and Telepresence 2 now available and free for everyone

Developers love to build but not if it means losing sleep. Yet, over the past few years, the notion of full-cycle development and service owners have put more and more developers on pager duty. “You build it, you run it” seems like a great idea, but maybe not at 3am.

Today, we’re excited to announce three new capabilities to the Ambassador stack, all so you can get a good night’s sleep: Service Catalog, Telepresence 2, and Edge Stack 1.12 with Argo Rollouts integration. With these new capabilities, when an incident happens, you’re able to find the information you need, fix the issue, and ship the fix — quickly.

Free for everyone 🙌

Sleep is an essential function. We don’t anyone to miss out on sleep because they can’t afford to use our software, so we’re making all this functionality free for everyone, with no usage restrictions. Just create a free account and get started!

Service Catalog 🔮

Have you ever been paged in the middle of the night to fix some service? Bleary-eyed, you kubectl get pods and find a pod in CrashLoopBackoff. You’ve never heard of this service, and have no idea where the runbook is for the service. If only …

You had the Service Catalog.

The Ambassador Service Catalog provides a comprehensive view of all services deployed across your cluster. Not only does the Service Catalog provide this view, the Service Catalog also displays critical human-visible metadata such as the owner of the service, the location of the service runbook, and more. Service Catalog leverages Kubernetes annotations to provide a simple, platform-neutral way to document this information. Here’s an example service:

We’ve designed the Service Catalog to be easy for anyone to use:

1. Use kubectl annotate or add annotations to your Kubernetes services, as documented in the a8r.io schema.
2. Create a free Ambassador account.
3. Deploy Edge Stack to send this information from your cluster to the Service Catalog. You can even use your existing ingress controller.

Watch the demo video.

Telepresence 2 🏎

The Service Catalog lets you quickly find the necessary information to respond to an incident. While it won’t fix an issue for you, Telepresence can help. Normally, setting up a full reproduction environment for a microservice application is a pain — if you even have enough memory to run the full application locally.

With Telepresence, deploy the errant service locally on your laptop. Telepresence creates a two-way connection to the remote cluster where the rest of the application is running. You’ve instantly created a reproduction environment. Best of all, you can use your favorite IDE and debugger to figure out what’s going on and deploy that fix.

In January, we announced the integration of Telepresence with Ambassador Cloud. We’ve now open sourced the next-generation Telepresence 2 client. Rewritten from the ground up in Golang, Telepresence 2 lets you debug even more effectively. Startup times have been reduced by 90%. Preview URLs let you share what you’re working on with colleagues so you can collaboratively develop and test your service. And much more!

If you’re already on Telepresence 2, this release adds the following enhancements:

• Support for intercepting services with multiple ports
• Support for clusters with large numbers of services

Get started today with the Telepresence 2 quick start.

Edge Stack 1.12 with Argo Rollouts 🚀

You’ve found the source repository and runbook with the Service Catalog. You’ve debugged and fixed the issue with Telepresence. Now, you need to push the fix to production carefully. You need to do a canary release.

With Edge Stack 1.12, you can now plug Edge Stack directly into your continuous integration workflow to do canary rollouts. Deploy a new version of a service, and tell Edge Stack to incrementally ramp up traffic over a specific time period. We’ve built this integration directly into Argo Rollouts.Part of the CNCF Argo Project, Argo Rollouts has been adopted by dozens of organizations to do canary deploys and integrates with any continuous integration system.

Besides the integration with Argo, both API Gateway and Edge Stack 1.12 includes a bevy of additional enhancements and fixes. Here are a few highlights:

• Significantly improved endpoint routing performance in clusters with frequent reconfigurations.
• Edge Stack now includes native integration with the Ambassador Service Catalog.
• More controls have been added, including support for suppressing Envoy diagnostic headers, setting a global default for timeouts, and setting maximum upstream connection timeouts. For more information, see the detailed CHANGELOG.

As part of this release, we’re announcing the Argo Early Adopter program for teams that want to adopt state-of-the-art continuous delivery workflows. By joining the program, you can get free access to additional new continuous delivery features. Apply now to join the program, or get started today with the Argo Rollouts and Edge Stack quick start. If you’re just interested in Edge Stack, you can deploy Edge Stack 1.12 today using our command-line installer, Helm, or YAML.

Get some rest 💤

An average person spends 26 years sleeping, plus 7 years of trying to get to sleep. With Service Catalog for faster incident response, Telepresence for faster fixes, and Edge Stack for continuous delivery — you can now get back to sleep.

Get started today:

• 🔮 Sign up for a free Ambassador Cloud account to start using Service Catalog
• Get started with Telepresence 2
• Get started with Argo and Edge Stack
• Apply to the Argo Early Access program
• Register for a Community Office Hours session for a deep dive on the new releases with a member of the Ambassador Labs team