Guest: Sudeep Goswami (LinkedIn) | Maytham Alfouadi (LinkedIn)
Company: Traefik Labs (Twitter)
Show: Let’s See

Traditional API management solutions were built before the cloud-native era. The architecture tends to be monolithic, the consumption model is either all or nothing. The workflows are UI-based, and the deployment environment is very opinionated (usually requires on-prem presence). In short, they do not scale. Some of the newer solutions are cloud native, but they are not aligned with Kubernetes, which has become the standard operating model for deploying applications and gives people the application agility for their digital transformation initiatives.

In this episode of TFiR: Let’s See, Traefik Labs Chief Revenue Officer Sudeep Goswami and Solutions Architect Maytham Alfouadi, demonstrate the capabilities of its latest product, Traefik Hub, a Kubernetes-native management solution for publishing, securing, and managing APIs.

Goswami explains that Kubernetes-native means having:

• Deep awareness of services: Auto-discovery of all services.
• High availability:  Through replicas, there is an understanding of how to deploy these services in a highly available manner.
• Built-in security: With auto-discovery, the operator has full control of visibility and level of exposure – either as APIs or as web applications with certain authentication parameters, etc.
• An elevated GitOps experience: Custom resource definition (CRD) is a first-class citizen so you can have a manifest that you can fully automate.

During the demonstration:

• Alfouadi points out all the important information you can quickly obtain, such as the number of agents currently managed, number of services currently running across all your clusters, number of access controls currently defined, number of servers currently published across all your clusters.
• From the cluster agent, it shows multiple Kubernetes clusters residing across multiple cloud providers and the edge. It provides full visibility of the cluster and a full list of APIs that are published through this cluster.
• If you click on one of the APIs, it provides more information about this specific API in the backend application.
• You can quickly publish an application that is running on this cluster through the dashboard, which gives you a quick time-to-value if you want to test an API quickly.
• You can bundle APIs into a collection using labels. This allows more flexibility and reusability.
• When referencing these APIs from the portal view, you can apply API access control policies to restrict access to specific user groups.
• There is an API developer portal to be able to interact with these APIs directly.
• Because Traefik Hub is Kubernetes-native, everything that is defined through the dashboard gets translated into CRDs. You just need to define the following: API definition file, API collection, API access policy, and API portal definition file. Once you have all these definition parts ready, you can use your preferred GitOps solution like Argo CD or Flux CD and you can deploy, publish and manage your APIs in seconds.

This summary was written by Camille Gregory.