Introducing Traefik Pilot: a First Look at Our New SaaS Control Platform for Traefik
Today, we’re excited to announce the early-access preview of Traefik Pilot, a new SaaS global control plane, to simplify the management of Traefik running in production. Pilot extends the capabilities of Traefik, providing a powerful observability and control platform for every one of your Traefik instances in a single unified dashboard.
In addition, Traefik Pilot introduces plugins for Traefik, including a first of its kind open marketplace, which extends Traefik middleware with custom, purpose-built requests and responses processing.
The preview release of Pilot includes:
- Custom Middleware Plugins! Our brand new plugins marketplace including examples of custom middleware
- Centralized view of your production Traefik instances
- Availability and security vulnerability alerts with notifications
Custom Middleware Plugins
One of the most frequently requested features from the Traefik community is the ability to easily create and share custom plugins and extend the functionality of our existing middleware catalog. Built on Yaegi, the new plugin system offers an elegant, extensible, and high-performance way to augment Traefik's capabilities without the need to modify or compile the Traefik source code.
Traefik plugins are add-on packages that empower users to apply transformations and enhancements to both requests and responses, which are handled by Traefik. There have been several middleware pull requests declined due to implementations that are tied to a specific use case or for lacking the abstraction necessary to be accepted upstream into Traefik. Developers are now equipped with the tools needed to write plugins in Go, and sharing them with the world is as easy as publishing them on GitHub. The new plugin engine enables the community to install their custom middleware using Traefik Pilot without compiling a single line of code.
The initial release of Pilot includes a free to use plugin marketplace that extends Traefik by installing middleware plugins directly from the catalog. In addition, you can just as easily create, publish, and install your own. On launch day, the catalog will contain a few sample plugins that serve as advanced tutorials for developers to build their own. We expect the catalog to expand rapidly, especially as the Traefik community begins to write and share their new creations.
Security and Availability Alerting
Keeping track of your Traefik installations and ensuring they are healthy, available, and secure has, until today, required a significant amount of effort. Typically this involved deploying a system to gather metrics and creating an alerting system to notify you if there is a problem. With Pilot's introduction, we're now the first managed SaaS provider to offer security and availability monitoring of your cloud-native software load balancers, for free.
Once Traefik is registered, a built-in heartbeat mechanism will check-in with Pilot periodically and report the health and availability of your Traefik instance. In addition, Pilot will check for common vulnerabilities and exposure (CVE) bulletins that apply to your Traefik installation and configuration, which may indicate a security risk to your Traefik deployments. You may now use the dashboard to configure your alert settings and get notified of issues through email or custom webhooks before they become emergencies.
Get Started by Connecting Your Traefik Instance
Pilot requires the most recent version of Traefik, v2.3 RC. You will also now find a convenient link on the Traefik dashboard to register your instance with Pilot.
Once logged into Pilot, registering your Traefik instance by adding a unique token to your static configuration. This will automatically extend your installation's functionality by monitoring the health of your installation, enabling the use of custom middleware plugins, and reporting relevant vulnerabilities that apply to your environment.
Just the Beginning
This initial preview release brings exciting and new capabilities to the Traefik ecosystem, and this is just the beginning. We're even more excited by what we already have queued up for future iterations. Keep an eye out for Pilot to broaden the range and reach of your existing Traefik deployments. We're just getting started and have plans for additional capabilities from microservices routing and orchestrator ingress to expanding out to the global edge.
Jump in the cockpit with Pilot today and let us know what you think. What kinds of plugins will you write?
