The Evolution of the AppDirect Kubernetes Network Infrastructure — from KubeCon & CloudNativeCon

Last month at KubeCon & CloudNativeCon in Seattle, Pierre Lacerte, Director of Engineering, and Alex Gervais, Staff Software Developer spoke about the evolution of their Kubernetes network infrastructure.

AppDirect is a cloud commerce platform founded in 2009. They have ~200 engineers and are running 12 Kubernetes clusters that handle thousands of requests/minute. When they needed to make a decision about their ingress architecture, they knew they would also rely on their API gateway to provide key cross-cutting concerns like authentication, rate limiting, and observability. Their architecture evolved from NodePorts, to HAProxy/Consul, and they finally landed on Ambassador.

Their talk discusses how they use Ambassador as a control plane to the underlying Envoy data plane which allows them to specify routing and rate limiting via Kubernetes annotations, as well as their failures and lessons learned along the way. You can check out their talk and slides below: