emissary VS ingress-nginx

We will install Ambassador Gateway which is an open-source Kubernetes-native API gateway for microservices. We will use it as a reverse proxy to manage external access to services within our Kubernetes cluster.

Command and Query services APIs can be managed via lightweight, independently deployable, and scalable API gateways that can run anywhere that allow developers to manage API endpoints. They can handle extremely large volumes, as they run on highly scalable platforms, for example, Apache APISIX, Kong, Tyk, and Ambassador to name a few.

Ambassador

Did you know that it takes 23 minutes to get into a flow state? For some people it takes even longer. That means that for every question, disruption, email, and interruption that you or your coworkers are subjected to, it could be half an hour of productivity down the drain. We talked to Katie Wilde, VP of Engineering at Ambassador Labs, about how she manages workflow

Let's dive deep and start understanding more bit about Emissary Ingress.

Emissary is pretty much the gold standard for people with complicated setups: https://github.com/emissary-ingress/emissary

Katie Wilde, VP of Engineering at Ambassador Labs, knows your pain and she’s on a crusade to help devs everywhere reclaim their focus.

Ambassador API Gateway is an Envoy-based ingress controller.

I am starting to doubt their marketing materials about broad adoption, because we cannot get it to work even with basic setup. Apart from terrible DX (e.g. you can provide whatever arbitrary configs, there is no validation), we keep hitting bug after bug after bug. They are not small bugs either, e.g. broken redirects. Any time I try asking questions in their Slack, their sales rep will message asking to "connect via zoom meeting to cover the pricing".

Peter: Yeah. So that was my first time having a DevRel title. I was a developer Advocate for Ambassador Labs, another startup. And so I think they were Series B at the time. They were centered around the developer experience. So I had a lot of fun diving into the DevRel industry with them. And so my manager that I was working for has a long history of DevRel. And so I got to learn a lot of tips and tricks from him.

# Add NGINX ingress using Helm eks.HelmChart( self, "NginxIngress", cluster=cluster, chart="ingress-nginx", repository="https://kubernetes.github.io/ingress-nginx", namespace="ingress-nginx", values=helm_values )

ingress-nginx

The second one is a combination of tools: External DNS, cert-manager, and NGINX ingress. Using these as a stack, you can quickly deploy an application, making it available through a DNS with a TLS without much effort via simple annotations. When I first discovered External DNS, I was amazed at its quality.

resource "helm_release" "icrelease" { name = "nginx-ingress" repository = "https://kubernetes.github.io/ingress-nginx" chart = "ingress-nginx" version = "4.9.1" namespace = kubernetes_namespace.icnamespace.metadata[0].name set { name = "controller.ingressClassResource.default" value = "true" } }

helm repo add ingress-nginx https://kubernetes.github.io/ingress-nginx helm repo update helm upgrade --install ingress-nginx ingress-nginx/ingress-nginx --namespace ingress-nginx --create-namespace -f custom/ghost/nginx.yaml

For example, if you chose Nginx Ingress, you will use some of its dozens of annotations that are not portable if you decide to switch to another Ingress implementation like Apache APISIX.

The controller is installed with helm upgrade --install ingress-nginx ingress-nginx --repo https://kubernetes.github.io/ingress-nginx --namespace ingress-nginx --create-namespace

helm repo add jetstack https://charts.jetstack.io helm repo add ingress-nginx https://kubernetes.github.io/ingress-nginx helm repo add rancher-latest https://releases.rancher.com/server-charts/latest helm repo update helm repo list

Everything in the YAML snippets below — except for ingress configuration — relates to configuring the NGINX ingress controller. This includes customizing the default configuration.