Ambassador Edge Stack 2.0: API Gateway Evolution

Introduction

Ambassador Edge Stack 2.0, released on November 12, 2019, is aimed at the part of Kubernetes most teams feel first: the edge. If you’ve ever had “Ingress + a pile of annotations” turn into a fragile maze of auth, retries, timeouts, and CORS rules, that’s the pain this release is trying to tame.

The big story isn’t “more features” — it’s making security and traffic controls feel like first-class, repeatable building blocks you can standardize across teams.

Security: authentication, authorization, and TLS lifecycle

• Authentication: Broader support for OAuth2 / JWT flows and external auth services, so you can keep identity logic centralized.
• Authorization: More expressive policies for controlling who can call what (especially important in shared clusters).
• TLS management: Better certificate automation and rotation workflows (the difference between “secure” and “secure at 2am during a renewal”).
• WAF integration: Hooks for adding web application firewall protections where you need them.

Traffic management patterns (and the sharp edges)

1. Circuit breaking: Protect backends from cascading failures when a dependency starts timing out.
2. Retry policies: Add retries with backoff — but be careful: retries can multiply load during incidents if you don’t cap budgets.
3. Timeouts: Tune per-route timeouts so you don’t apply the same SLA to login, checkout, and batch APIs.
4. CORS: Make browser clients happy, but avoid “* everywhere” defaults in production unless you truly mean it.

In practice, teams usually start here:

• Auth at the edge, then a small set of standardized mappings for common API shapes (REST + gRPC + internal admin routes).
• One place for timeouts and retries, reviewed like application code to prevent accidental “infinite patience” or “retry storms”.

Operations & developer experience

• Configuration ergonomics: Easier-to-review manifests help reduce copy/paste drift between services.
• CRD improvements: More Kubernetes-native primitives that play well with GitOps workflows and RBAC.
• Docs and examples: Better coverage for common scenarios (the part that usually blocks adoption).
• CLI tooling: Faster debugging loops when you’re chasing routing or auth failures.

Getting Started

kubectl apply -f https://www.getambassador.io/yaml/aes-crds.yaml
kubectl wait --for condition=established --timeout=90s crd -lproduct=aes
kubectl apply -f https://www.getambassador.io/yaml/aes.yaml

Create a Mapping with authentication:

apiVersion: getambassador.io/v2
kind: Mapping
metadata:
  name: backend-mapping
spec:
  prefix: /backend/
  service: backend-service:8080
  auth_service: auth-service:3000
  timeout_ms: 3000
  cors:
    origins: "*"
    methods:
      - GET
      - POST

Summary

Ambassador Edge Stack 2.0 provides teams with powerful API gateway capabilities for secure and efficient API management in Kubernetes.