Announcing Traefik Hub — The Cloud Native Networking Platform
We are thrilled to announce the beta launch of Traefik Hub, a cloud native networking platform that helps publish, secure, and scale containers at the edge instantly. Traefik Hub provides a gateway to your services running on Kubernetes or any other orchestrator.
The past few years have seen enterprises abandoning their legacy monoliths in droves, adopting and scaling the modern, distributed systems championed by containers. Networking was (and still is) the glue that keeps these cloud native applications together.
When I founded Traefik Labs in 2016, I understood the need to make cloud native networking as simple as possible. Cloud native applications are heterogeneous and spread across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, meaning connectivity is complicated yet crucial. I created Traefik Proxy, a simple, automated, and open source ingress and reverse proxy, to facilitate the management of network traffic in highly dynamic environments.
Traefik Proxy has made it efficient for all kinds of organizations to network complex deployments. It lets clusters route incoming requests to the right service. Thanks to a vibrant community, it has grown to over 3 billion downloads and 38K stars on GitHub, making it one of Docker Hub’s top 10 most downloaded technologies.
Today, enterprises are running architectures that are even more complex and distributed than they were in 2016. Far more clusters are being deployed across increasingly distributed environments, stretching networks to their capacity. Services must be accessible from anywhere on the internet. Often conflicting tools and processes make services accessible from anywhere on the internet — but the work required is manual, susceptible to human error, and operationally costly. Networking becomes exponentially difficult as an application scales, and the need for a unified cloud native networking solution intensifies.
This is why I am thrilled to announce the beta launch of Traefik Hub. It is the latest iteration of our mission to simplify cloud native networking, and it complements the capabilities of Traefik Proxy to streamline cloud native networking at scale.
What is Traefik Hub?
Traefik Hub is a cloud native networking platform that helps you publish, secure, and scale containers at the edge instantly. It provides end-to-end connectivity from users to containers as well as a gateway into each of your services. It is a unified solution for networking multiple clusters in distributed systems, and it consolidates the numerous layers of your networking stack through a simple, easy-to-use dashboard.
Traefik Hub is an out-of-the-box solution that is easy to learn and even easier to implement. Development teams can publish applications to the internet with a simple click and automate the configuration of important security practices. Traefik Hub encourages collaboration between teams, allowing them to start small and scale to multiple clusters. Traefik Hub simplifies the challenges innate to modern, distributed systems.
How Traefik Hub works
You may be wondering how Traefik Hub works. Its fully managed platform sits above your infrastructure and connects with agents that you install in each of your clusters. Agents are attached to ingress instances. They act as gateways into each of your services, a unique and secure entrypoint. The platform sends instructions to and receives key metrics from each agent. Traefik Hub works for Kubernetes or Docker clusters. Let’s walk through the key ways Traefik Hub simplifies cloud native networking.
One-click service publication
Traefik Hub makes it easy to publish and expose any application to the internet. Install the Hub agent in your cluster, select the port and access control policy (or allow Traefik Hub to auto-detect for you), and then click ‘Expose the service.’ It’s that simple. In a matter of seconds, your service will be directly exposed to the internet through a DNS name that you can share with your friends or colleagues.
Advanced security for containers
With Traefik Hub, your containers are secure both when being published and accessed. The platform connects with agents through a private, encrypted tunnel that allows you to publish your services without worrying about public IP or NAT configurations. You also have the option of flexible access and automated certificate management, as Traefik Hub supports JSON Web Tokens (JWT) and Basic Auth. Certificate management is another key component of cloud native security, and it’s automated in Traefik Hub. Traefik Hub requests, renews, and propagates ACME certificates to maintain consistent security configurations. DNS, routing rules, access control, and NAT are automated, and therefore scalable and less prone to human error. Your attack surface is minimized and strengthened.
Flexible and automated scaling to multiple clusters
The centralized and easy-to-use Hub platform lets you seamlessly scale your deployments to multiple clusters. Any questions you might have about the configuration, inbound traffic, and health of your published clusters are available in the dashboard. Important metrics such as the number of requests per second, average response time, and request errors per second are easily accessible. As a simple and unified networking tool, Traefik Hub lets you grow the network alongside your deployments.
How to get started
Traefik Hub is easy to get started with. All you have to do is create an account and install the Hub agent on your cluster (just make sure your cluster already has a Traefik Proxy instance). From there, you can let Hub discover your services and then select the services you want to publish.
It goes without saying, but thank you to our community, customers, and everyone who has joined us in our journey. Without your conversations and feedback, we would not be launching Traefik Hub today. We are keen to hear from you and will have more to say about Traefik Hub in the coming weeks.
