API Gateway
A modern API gateway like Edge Stack Kubernetes API gateway empowers organizations with a cost-effective solution to harness the full potential of their microservices architecture by streamlining application development and management in a Kubernetes ecosystem. One area where Edge Stack really shines is in continuous delivery testing on many levels.
For example, you can deploy a new service or an upgraded version of a service into production and hide, or “cloak,” this service from end-users via the gateway. This effectively separates the deployment and release process, allowing you to run acceptance and nonfunctional tests on the cloaked service, such as load tests and security analysis. You can also perform canary testing by allowing a small amount of user traffic to flow to this new deployment.
There is also potential to use a gateway to “shadow” (duplicate) real production traffic to the new version of the service and hide the responses from the user, and “shift” traffic around to focus load on a specific cluster of your system. Finally, you can use an API gateway to implement and control chaos testing. These techniques allow you to learn how your service will perform under realistic use cases, load, and failure scenarios, which are critical for continuous delivery testing.
July 19, 2024 | 5 min read
API Gateway
You’ve probably bumped into the term “dark launch” when reading about software feature releases by companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon etc. In fact, Facebook coined the term when describing the launch of a new chat feature. They called it a dark launch because they deployed the code responsible for the new chat service to a small segment of their audience at a time. This allowed the engineers to monitor the new service using real production traffic without impacting the broad Facebook population’s user experience.
What is Dark Launch?
As in the Facebook example, a dark launch is an approach for incrementally releasing production-ready software features to groups of users, enabling you to assess real-time feedback and make changes before launching widely. Similarly, you can use this process for deploying code changes and exposing them only in a limited environment without any traffic going through their exposed parts—think beta testing but with no humans involved.
July 16, 2024 | 4 min read
API Gateway
One of our new segments, Community Corner, features weekly deep dives into common questions we get in our Community across our products: Edge Stack, Telepresence, and Blackbird. As one of the core members of our customer team, one of the most common questions I see revolves around the key differences between our open-source offering, Emissary-Ingress, and our commercial product, Edge Stack API Gateway.
The TL/DR:
Edge Stack is Ambassador’s licensed API Gateway. It’s a closed-source product that has been adopted by companies in various industries around the world to manage traffic to their cloud-based services.
July 12, 2024 | 8 min read
Article
On the latest Livin’ on the Edge podcast (and my last episode for Season 3), I interviewed Vasil Kaftandzhiev, a fellow Product Manager at Grafana. We explored the importance of observability in IT systems, particularly in the context of cloud infrastructure and Kubernetes management.
Observability is the constant monitoring of the system and of business KPIs with the goal of understanding why something is happening. It goes beyond the here-and-now of just monitoring (which itself is key to observability) and extends to the analysis and understanding of broader problems or issues, the underlying system and root causes.
July 11, 2024 | 7 min read
Kubernetes API Gateway
Filtering and segmenting traffic to and from your app is critical to the consistent safety of your software development lifecycle, and finding the right API Gateway is just as important. Let’s look through the key components of an API gateway and the different ways companies tend to price them.
What is an API Gateway?
A Kubernetes API Gateway acts as a critical checkpoint in your infrastructure where you can place barriers and rules for APIs connecting to your microservices.
July 8, 2024 | 6 min read
API Development
Let’s say you have to build a carousel component for an e-commerce site. How would you go about that?
One option would be to design it in Figma and then code it in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. You’d have to create the layout, add navigation, implement transitions, and ensure responsiveness across different devices. Likely, you’ll also have to integrate with an e-commerce backend through an API and match the styling to your existing website.
With design, frontend, backend, and deployment, this quickly becomes a team endeavor.
July 2, 2024 | 13 min read
