Features
The Ambassador Edge Stack is a family of products that provides a comprehensive solution for your Kubernetes edge needs. The family contains the Edge Stack API Gateway, Developer Portal, and Service Preview.
API Gateway
The Edge Stack API Gateway takes the capabilities of the Ambassador API Gateway and adds authentication and security among other capabilities. The Edge Stack API Gateway includes:
Delivery Accelerator
With the Delivery Accelerator, teams can rapidly build version 0 and eliminate friction in the inner and outer development loops to deliver business value sooner.
Developer Portal
The Ambassador Edge Stack includes an API catalog, Swagger/OpenAPI documentation support, and a fully customizable developer portal.
API Gateway Modules and Features
Ingress Controller for Kubernetes
Routing traffic into your Kubernetes cluster requires modern traffic management. The Ambassador Edge Stack is a modern Kubernetes ingress controller that supports a broad range of protocols including gRPC and gRPC-Web, supports TLS termination, and provides traffic management controls for resource availability.
Protocol Support
Microservices today communicate using a wide variety of protocols. The Ambassador Edge Stack supports a broad range of protocols.
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Cross-Origin Resource Sharing
Ambassador lets users request resources (e.g., images, fonts, videos) from domains outside the original domain.
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TLS
Provide a crucial layer of privacy and security protection for end users with HTTPS.
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Kubernetes Integration
The Ambassador Edge Stack supports the Kubernetes Ingress specification and can therefore act as a Kubernetes ingress controller. Ambassador's declarative configuration model extends the Kubernetes workflow and minimizes the learning curve for new users.
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Edge Management
The Ambassador Edge Stack empowers developers and DevOps teams with self-service functionality for managing changes to routing. This includes a declarative policy engine, CRD configurations, an optional UI, and integrations for distributed tracing and observability.
Declarative Policy Engine
Ambassador takes advantage of Kubernetes Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs) to provide a declarative configuration workflow that is idiomatic with Kubernetes.
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Edge Policy Console
The Edge Policy Console works seamlessly with the Kubernetes API to give platform engineers and developers the ability to easily configure, manage, and visualize edge policies with the ease-of-use and visibility of a graphical interface.
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Distributed Tracing Integrations
Distributed Tracing is a powerful tool to debug and analyze your system in addition to request logging and metrics. Ambassador integrates with external trace visualization services and Zipkin-compatible APIs, like Jaeger.
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Observability Integrations
The Ambassador Edge Stack exposes statistics via the ubiquitous and well-tested StatsD protocol. Ambassador makes it easy to direct this information to a statistics and monitoring tool of your choice.
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Traffic Management
Microservices may crash, but your application shouldn’t. The Ambassador Edge Stack includes support for automatic retries, timeouts, circuit breakers, and rate limiting to maximize application availability.
Load Balancing
Load balancing allows you to maximize the scalability and availability of your application by efficiently distributing network traffic among backend services. Ambassador supports the following load balancing techniques
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Circuit Breaking
Circuit breakers limit the blast radius of an overloaded service by preventing additional connections or requests to an overloaded service.
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Progressive Delivery
Manipulate production traffic for testing features before release with Ambassador Edge Stack’s traffic management controls.
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Service Mesh
Ambassador natively supports service meshes for service discovery, end-to-end TLS, and observability.
Service Mesh Integrations
Multi-Cluster Support
Ambassador works with LinkerD to allow organizations to quickly and easily deploy their application in a way that spans multiple clusters.
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Secure and Authentication
The Ambassador Edge Stack makes securing microservices easy with a comprehensive set of security functionality, including automatic TLS, authentication, rate limiting, WAF integration, and fine-grained access control.
Authentication
Secure access to your services and integrate with popular identity providers. Declare access control policies and control who has access to specific services.
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WAF Integration
The Ambassador Edge Stack integrates with Signal Sciences Next-Gen WAF to screen for all incoming traffic at the cluster edge.
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Signal Sciences and Ambassador →
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Rate Limiting
Ensure your services remain available, even when under heavy load.
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SNI and Automatic HTTPS
The Ambassador Edge Stack enables automatic TLS setup via ACME integration and serving multiple Hosts behind a single IP address, each with their own certificate
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Custom Request Filters
Custom request filters allow you to execute custom logic in Filters. Inspect or validate an incoming request, and add custom Authorization headers.
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Delivery Acclerator Modules and Features
Local Development
Constant container deployments complicate the inner development loop. Preview microservice changes locally as if they are in the shared dev cluster without affecting the work of their peers.
Service Preview
Service Preview leverages Telepresence and the fine-grained layer 7 routings available with the Ambassador Edge Stack to accelerate the inner development loop.
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Learn More:
Four Approaches for Microservice Testing & Inner Dev Loops →
CI/CD Pipeline
The MicroCD Pipeline feature enables developers to stand up version 0 of their services. Once you confirm the infrastructure and start making improvements, you can switch to using a CI/CD solution like Jenkins X or continue using the MicroCD Pipeline for smaller, low-risk services.
MicroCD Pipeline
The MicroCD Pipeline feature supports enables developers to build and deploy containers directly from GitHub code. Teams can leverage the Kubernetes edge to stand up dancing skeletons or version 0 of their services to confirm the infrastructure or services that are smaller or temporary.
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Deploying to Kubernetes from Github →
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Integration with CI/CD Solutions
Ambassador integrates with popular CI/CD solutions such as Jenkins X.
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Continuous Delivery, GitOps, and Declarative Configuration →
Learn More:
Webinar: Securing Apps Deployed via Jenkins X Using Ambassador →
Blog: Securing Apps Deployed via Jenkins X Using Ambassador Edge Stack →
Developer Portal Modules and Features
Developer Portal
Your developer community, both internal and external, needs to understand your APIs. The AES includes an API catalog, Swagger/OpenAPI documentation support, and a fully customizable developer portal.
Developer Portal
The Developer Portal gives your developers a central self-service hub for your APIs. With the Developer Portal, developers are able to onboard and start using your APIs right away.
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