Bootstrap Networking, Ingress, and Observability in Five Clicks with the K8s Initializer
From empty cluster to an application-ready Kubernetes environment
It’s easy enough to spin up a local skeleton Kubernetes environment using tools like minikube, microk8s, or k3s, but getting an application-ready Kubernetes cluster that can route user-generated (or test) traffic to observable backend services is more challenging. In order to be productive, engineers need to move from working with a simple skeleton cluster to a “dancing skeleton”, application-ready Kubernetes environment. The K8s Initializer can help you do just this!
Production-like Networking Challenges
In order to illustrate some of the challenges with bootstrapping a cluster for development, let’s run through a couple of common scenarios. If you are moving from a local development cluster to a cloud-based Kubernetes environment the challenge increases dramatically; each vendor has various quirks associated with networking and security that have ramifications for your Kubernetes config. For example, do you need an Amazon ELB, NLB, or ALB, or are you using a GCP L4 or (HTTPS-friendly) L7 load balancer?
Layering on production-like configuration — which is essential for realistic testing in development — adds to the challenge again: as a developer, can I assume I will never be dealing with cleartext traffic, and do I have a guarantee that my networking stack will preserve the client IP address?
The Need for a Productive Developer Experience
Being able to initialize an application-ready Kubernetes cluster is an essential prerequisite to a productive developer experience. The K8s Initializer is a web-based self-service interface that allows developers to bootstrap networking, ingress, and observability in a new Kubernetes cluster in just 5 clicks.
New to Kubernetes? Initialize It!
If you are new to Kubernetes or simply have a blank Kubernetes cluster, the Initializer will help you create an application-ready cluster with ingress and observability automatically configured. You can easily test out the extensive functionality of the Ambassador Edge Stack and Prometheus in an environment that will be just like your production cluster.
You can deploy a new service to the cluster in minutes and access this via a properly configured cloud load balancer and Kubernetes ingress, and view top line metrics via Prometheus. Try it now!
K8s Initializer for Existing Users
The K8s Initializer generates configuration based on well-established best practices and input of thousands of customers running Kubernetes clusters in production. You can use the Initializer to automatically generate configuration customized to your production environments and compare configurations and diff the YAML between the Initializer output and what you’ve created yourself. Try it now!
Get Started
Take the Initializer for a spin by visiting k8sinitializer.getambassador.io and let us know what you think of the tool via the built-in chat or in our Slack channel.
