The Cloud’s Scaffolding Tool For Modern Platforms
Kubernetes is a fantastic foundation for an application platform, but it is just that — a foundational component. In order for it to be useful for application developers Kubernetes must be augmented with continuous delivery, ingress and an API gateway, and observability. You need to get your apps onto Kubernetes, you need to get user traffic into your applications, and you need to be able to understand what is going on.
The abstractions provided within Kubernetes are fantastic. They are clearly defined, and they enable you to swap in and out various components like container runtimes, networking, storage, and observability, as required. The flipside of this “swappability” is that it can be hard simply to spin up a platform to experiment with. You’re faced with the paradox of choice, and you also have to wire everything up together.
Sure, you can go all-in with a Kubernetes platform-as-a-service (PaaS) type offering like OpenShift, but you can get locked-in different abstractions here. You can also investigate mini-PaaSs like Rancher Labs; Rio, but these don’t offer much in the way of configurability.
Standard Kubernetes environments and boilerplate setup
Cloud providers offer us one piece of the puzzle: the infrastructure. But they fail short at offering fully configured, turn-key, application-ready environments. When deploying to multiple cloud providers, subtle differences can make portability a nightmare: picking the right load-balancer appliance, its settings and translating this into Kubernetes YAML is a problem we have to solve way too often.
Whether you are looking at getting up and running quickly with the latest versions of a Cloud-Native application stack, or you work in enterprise software where standardization and iteration speed is an issue, we believe the K8s Initializer will guide you through the adoption of best practices and usage of common frameworks, allowing you to focus on just shipping your platform.
The K8s Initializer: like a bread maker, but for Kubernetes config
Many of us are familiar with language or framework initializers like the Spring Initializr or Yeoman that help us get started as quickly as possible. It’s easy to see these projects as breadmakers. Rather than doing everything by hand, we simply select the ingredients and press a few buttons to indicate our preferences, wait a bit, and out pops our bread. The K8s Initializer takes this concept and applies it to Kubernetes.
You select your cloud provider or local Kubernetes set up (minikube etc), answer a few simple questions about your ingress, CI/CD, and observability requirements, and out pops a correctly-formed series of YAML configs that can be used to instantly (and repeatedly) stand up an application-ready Kubernetes cluster.
Get started with the K8s Initializer in just 5 clicks
You can get started with the K8s Initializer by answering five simple questions here: https://app.getambassador.io/initializer/
We are always keen to hear feedback. The config generation has incorporated feedback and learning from 100s of Ambassador customers and community members, but we always value more input.
