Infinite-Scale Development Environments for Kubernetes Teams

AMBASSADOR CLOUD

When we started building applications on Kubernetes internally we quickly realized new challenges that we hadn’t experienced when working with our monolith. Suddenly, our developers were limited by slow feedback loops and resource-constrained development environments. Because of these challenges, it took us longer to ship new features than it did before.

In early 2017 we built Telepresence to address our own development challenges with Kubernetes. After talking with the community we quickly realized that our challenges with Kubernetes development were not unique, so we open sourced it, and in May 2018, we donated it to the CNCF to help grow the community. Today, Telepresence is used by thousands of developers to improve their day-to-day development experience on Kubernetes.

As more organizations have adopted Kubernetes and Telepresence, we’ve found that many struggle to scale the newfound efficiency of a single developer and apply it to entire teams. We’ve talked to many Telepresence users who love the tool but have struggled to use it to collaborate with colleagues who are newer to Kubernetes. To succeed with Kubernetes, organizations must have super efficient development teams, not just a few super efficient developers.

Today, we are excited to introduce Ambassador Cloud to make the whole development team faster and more efficient. Powered by Telepresence, Ambassador Cloud now combines all of the best features of Telepresence with a new focus on fostering easy collaboration among teammates. And, we’re making Ambassador Cloud free to get started for teams of any size!

Infinite-Scale Development Environments

In the transition from a monolith to a cloud native application, developers face challenges when their application becomes too complex to run on their local machine. With Kubernetes, this barrier is hit quickly as dependencies grow and more services are added to the application. Suddenly, laptop fans are spinning constantly because they don’t have enough memory to run the application and feature development takes longer and longer.

With Telepresence, developers have access to infinite-scale development environments. Instead of running the entire application on their local machine, Telepresence sets up a proxy so that developers can run a copy of a service on their local machine while bridging to their remote dependencies.

Today, we’ve added support for this use case into Ambassador Cloud. Now powered by Telepresence, Ambassador Cloud makes it possible for developers to develop on Kubernetes microservices no matter the resource constraints of their local machines.

Develop Faster Together

Modern software development requires frequent input from teammates, but sharing context takes up a lot of time when everyone is working in their own development environment. Ambassador Cloud reduces the time it takes for developers to share context by providing them with tools that foster seamless collaboration.

🆕 Intercepts

Intercepts enable developers to test and debug services locally without needing to run dependent services or redeploy to your cluster on every code change. Intercepts are an extension of the `swap-deployment` concept in the original Telepresence. In contrast with `swap-deployment` though, intercepts make it possible for multiple developers to be working on the same service at the same time. We inject a Telepresence proxy sidecar into a pod in order to intercept traffic, rather than swapping the entire deployment with a two-way proxy, and make it much easier to manage multiple intercepts.

🆕 Preview URLs

For each intercepted service, Ambassador Cloud automatically generates a preview URL so that developers can easily share access to their environment with teammates. This eliminates the need for developers to spend hours attempting to reproduce bugs on their own. Sharing access to intercepts via a preview URL is also a great way to effectively pair program using the same cluster.

When a preview URL is sent, the recipient is required to login with a GitHub account affiliated with the same organization as the sender. This is to ensure preview URLs are sent safely, and can only be accessed by your teammates.

🆕 Cloud Dashboard

Ambassador’s cloud dashboard makes it easy for developers to track the services they have intercepted, the preview URLs they have shared, and which team members have accessed their preview URLs.

See Ambassador Cloud powered by Telepresence in Action

Like what you see? Share it with your friends! To learn more about the new features in Ambassador Cloud, check out our website.

A New, More Reliable Architecture for Telepresence

We’re excited to share some new features with the Telepresence community. To better support collaboration for development teams, we needed to make some changes to Telepresence:

• We’ve rewritten Telepresence from Python to Go to make it faster.
• A sidecar proxy is now deployed next to the service you are intercepting, making Telepresence more reliable and giving end users more control over traffic routing.
• A new persistent in-cluster Telepresence agent allows you to set RBAC permissions at the cluster-level. This agent also enables auto-reconnect support. This makes Telepresence easier for developers to install, and easier for DevOps or platform teams to manage.
• A simplified command line interface makes Telepresence easier to use.

This version of Telepresence that powers Ambassador Cloud will be open sourced in time for KubeCon EU. We prioritized releasing the binary as soon as possible in order to get feedback from the community. We are looking forward to taking these learnings and contributing them back to the open source community soon. If you have feedback on how Telepresence works for you, we’d love to hear it!

Get Started with Ambassador Cloud for Fast, Efficient Development Today

Ambassador Cloud is generally available today and is free for teams of any size. With our free tier, an unlimited number of developers in an organization can use Telepresence to collaborate and develop rapidly on up to five services.

Create an account and try the quickstart now, or check out the following resources to learn more:

• Watch the Demo Video
• Read more about fast, efficient Kubernetes development
• Learn more about using Telepresence with Ambassador Cloud
• Join our Slack channel to meet the community and ask questions
• Once you’ve tried it, share your feedback with the team!
• Share Ambassador Cloud with your friends