CNCF Officially Names Emissary-ingress an Incubation-level Project

After 7 progressive years in Sandbox, Emissary-Ingress wears the Incubation cloak a year after request.

April 23, 2021, 12:24 p.m.

TL;DR

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s Technical Oversight Committee has announced its decision to promote Emissary-Ingress, the Kubernetes-based API Gateway, into the incubation level on April 13, 2021.

Stepping into the incubation level, Emissary Ingress has a lot of achievements under its belt.

Key Facts

1
Emissary-Ingress is built on the flagship cloud-native proxy of the team at Lyft, Envoy Proxy.
2
The organizations that use the API gateway have a high processing capacity of as many as 500,000 requests across about 15 million users, according to Ambassador Labs.
3
The dependency on Emissary-ingress to control north-south traffic is relatively increasing.

Details

The API Gateway first received breath in 2014 when Ambassador Labs, previously known as Datawire, wanted to build an open-source core to support the Ambassador Edge Stack. It was once known as Ambassador, now the open-source ingress controller, and Kubernetes API Gateway is on the incubation level of CNCF cloud ranks.

The project has caught the eye of thousands of organizations and has been successfully fashioned into production. There have been acquisitions from notable firms like Lifion by ADP, Chick-Fil_A, OneFootball, and AppDirect. There have been positive mind-blowing reviews about the required capacities. Customers claim emissary-ingress can contain rooftop requirements of 500 requests every second from 15 million users in 10 minutes.

Working with the Emissary-Ingress community over the last four years has been wonderful, and I’m very proud of everything we’ve accomplished to make life easier for Kubernetes developers, I look forward to more great things ahead as we join the CNCF.
Flynn Hood
Creator of Ambassador and engineer at Ambassador Labs

The first Ingress controller to join the CNCF went by Contour, developed by VMWare. However, CEO and founder of Ambassador Labs, Richard Li, claims that Emissary Ingress has more to offer in terms of API Gateway functionality than the latter. The Emissary Ingress underwent very technical construction implementing the Kubernetes Network Working Group-defined Ingress Specification. In contrast, inherent of the API Gateway is a set of that functionality, covering north-south traffic and executing functionality like authentication and rate-limiting, with other prospective features. Emissary Ingress also holds the fundamental components of Ingress, such as secondary integration with multi-platform apps like Prometheus, Datadog, and Grafana, developer induction with a developer portal, connection to service mesh like Istio, Linkerd, Consul, and Knative serverless integration.

Emissary ingress retains persistence through Kubernetes, eliminating the need for a separate database, delegating other backup tasks to Kubernetes. It performs the same as Envoy because all its Layer 7 routing was developed on Envoy Proxy. The addition of new project maintainers over multiple organizations is critical for the Emissary-Ingress blueprint, which is amongst caching APIs, emerging standards, and WASM.

Stepping into the incubation level, Emissary Ingress has a lot of achievements under its belt. They have gathered 2k pull requests, 1.2k issues, 150+ contributors, 500+ releases, and 3.2k GitHub Stars. It joins Dragonfly, Flux, KubeEdge, NATS, Notary, Operator Framework, SPIFFE, Argo, Buildpacks, CloudEvents, OpenTracing, Thanos, Contour, CNI, Cortex, Flux gRPC, CRI-O, Rook, SPIRE, Falco, and Linkerd in the incubation ranks of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation