One year ago, we shipped the first release of Ambassador. Since then, Ambassador has grown from a proof of concept into a full fledged open source project:
- More than 500 GitHub Stars
- Thousands of new downloads a month
- Dozens of new features including authentication, TLS termination, traffic shadowing, rate limiting, canary releases, and more
One of the core design principles of Ambassador is enabling decentralized, declarative configuration. By decentralized, we want to support service authors who want to control how traffic is routed to their given service. By declarative, we want users to be able to specify what their desired configuration end state, as opposed to specifying commands to get to the desired end state. To that end, our adoption of Kubernetes annotations has been highly popular with users. We’ve steadily expanded the features available to service authors, with significant contributions from our community.
In the coming year, we’re continuing to push Ambassador forward. We plan on adding support for gRPC-JSON encoding, deeper integration with Istio, and will be migrating to the Envoy v2 APIs. We also want to improve the documentation, with more HOWTOs and configuration with various Kubernetes environments. If there are specific features you’d like to request (or better yet, work on!), please visit our GitHub page: https://github.com/datawire/ambassador/.