3 years ago

Category: Kubernetes

The Emissary Ingress open source ingress controller and API gateway for Kubernetes has joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) at the incubation level this week. But “we just couldn’t give the CNCF full rights to our company name,” said Li, “and so we just agreed the simplest thing to do is just to rename it, and ’emissary’ is a different type of ‘ambassador.'”

Emissary Ingress is now just the second ingress controller to join the CNCF after VMWare‘s Contour, though Li says that Emissary Ingress has more functionality in the API gateway realm than Contour, which has just started to adopt those features. An ingress controller, Emissary Ingress has “a very technical construct” that implements the Ingress Specification as defined by the Kubernetes Networking Working Group, whereas the API gateway is more of a superset of that functionality, taking that same north south traffic and performing functionality such as authentication and rate limiting, among other potential features, Li said.

Emissary Ingress also relies on Kubernetes for persistence, which gets rid of the need for a separate database and allows Kubernetes to restart Emissary Ingress when problems occur.