It’s been an exciting eight months since launching Heptio Gimbal in partnership with Actapio and Yahoo Japan Corporation ahead of KubeCon EU 2018. We created Heptio Contour and Heptio Gimbal as a complementary pair of open source projects to enable organizations to unify and manage internet traffic in hybrid cloud environments.
Actapio and Yahoo Japan Corporation were critical early design partners and we were keen to consult with other Heptio customers as well as the larger Kubernetes community on how ingress could be improved. What we consistently heard was that people are struggling to manage ingress traffic in a multi-team and multi-cluster world. Notably, several of our customers had production outages due to teams creating conflicting routing rules with other teams.
Based on that feedback, we released Heptio Contour 0.6 in September which introduced the IngressRoute CRD, a novel new way of safely managing multi-team ingress. It’s been great to see community interest soar regarding our design and implementation that models Kubernetes Ingress similar to the delegation model of DNS. In particular, the ability to do instantaneous blue-green deployments of Ingress rules is a great feature that has come out of this work.
It’s important to recognize that the success of Heptio Contour and Heptio Gimbal wouldn’t be possible without building on Envoy proxy. We couldn’t be happier with Envoy’s recent graduation from the CNCF incubation process, joining Kubernetes and Prometheus as top-level CNCF projects.
At KubeCon NA next week, we’re excited to tell you more about these projects and Actapio & Yahoo Japan will be presenting on their production use of Heptio Gimbal. Read on for a complete list of related talks!
If you have any questions or are interested in learning more, reach us via the #contour and #gimbal channels on the Kubernetes community Slack or follow us on Twitter.