Traefik

Traefik Load Balancing software is a modern load balancer and reverse proxy that allows organizations to deploy microservices easily by integrating with their existing infrastructure components.

Overview

Traefik Load Balancing software allows users to deploy their microservices easily quickly. The software configures itself dynamically and automatically and is designed to be simple to operate.

Also, the software can handle highly-complex and large deployments across multiple protocols and environments in hybrid, private, and public clouds. Even more, Traefik gives users access to a robust set of middleware. These enhance the software's capabilities to incorporate east-west service communication, orchestrator ingress, API gateway, load balancing, and lots more.

Traefik also routes and intercepts incoming requests to their making backend service. Also, unlike statically designed reverse proxies, the software utilizes service discovery in dynamically configuring itself from the services. Even more, the software supports major protocols and can be easily managed using a range of customizable middleware for authentication, mirroring, circuit-breaking, rate-limiting, load balancing, and much more.

This load balancing software also supports SSL termination. Plus, users can use it with an ACME provider such as "Let's Encrypt" to generate certificates automatically. The software listens to users' service registry API and automatically generated the routes that allow their microservices to connect to the outside world; users do not have to interfere further at this point.

Additionally, Traefik comes with extensive capabilities and features stacked up to allow users to utilize the software as a comprehensive gateway to all their apps. The software also includes built-in support that can be used by distributed metrics and tracing providers. Plus, it integrates with a wide range of cluster technology and comes with an integrated dashboard for easy configuration.

Product Details

Traefik Load Balancing software supports dynamic configurations. This feature allows the software to discover services, such as Key-value stores, Amazon ECS, Rancher, Red Hat Open Shift, Docker Swarm, and Kubernetes, automatically. With this, users also have access to middleware like rate limiting, headers, response compression, buffering, automatic retries, and circuit breakers.

This feature also gives users access to configuration discovery tools known as Providers. This way, users can utilize existing infrastructure components like key-value stores, cloud providers, container engines, and orchestration. The software queries the Provider's API and identifies essential information about routing. And, once a change is detected, the software updates the routes dynamically.

Traefik Load Balancing software provides users with observability tools. The software has a built-in dashboard that allows users to perform configurations efficiently. Also, this dashboard is coupled with an API that helps with debugging.

Additionally, the software offers users distributed tracing like Zipkin, Open Tracing, and Jaeger, as well as access to real-time traffic metrics like StatsD, Prometheus, InfluxDB, Graphana, Datadog.

Traefik Load Balancing software allows users to control load to upstream services. The software has flexible layer seven and layer four load balancing and routing capabilities. It also has a wide range of middleware that allows mirrors, canary deployments, zero-downtime blue-green, dynamic scaling, and lots more.

With the software, users can define entry points, which are port numbers in their basic forms. The software's routers connect to these entry points and analyze an incoming request to determine if they follow a set of rules. Traefik also transforms requests using a toolkit of middleware before sending them to users' services.

Traefik Load Balancing software can be used as an API gateway. Users can use the software as a reverse proxy under their API services. The software also has middleware tools that can be used to offload cross-cutting issues like SSL termination, rate limiting, and authentication. Users can also access additional API gateway functionalities and tools from Traefik's Enterprise Edition.

Traefik also has pieces of middleware attached to the routers. This way, the software can tweak requests before an answer is sent to clients from the services, or before sending them to users' service.

With the middleware toolkit available on Traefik, users can modify requests, take charge of redirections, include authentication, modify headers, and so on. Also, users can combine pieces of middleware into chains to fit different scenarios.

Traefik Load Balancing software can be deployed as Kubernetes Ingress Controller for more ease of use, flexibility, and power. The software can be deployed to Kubernetes deployments and other user's network infrastructure.

This feature allows users to route traffic in multiple ways using Kubernetes to Kubernetes clusters from the outside world. They can also define an Ingress resource that declares user-defined routing rules and HTTP/S endpoints. Even more, each of these ingress resources is connected to an Ingress Controller, which is in charge of fulfilling the rules.

Traefik Load Balancing software supports certificate management. Users have access to built-in support for automatic certificate management (ACME) and other user-defined and dynamically-updatable certificates. Also, users with high-availability deployments like Kubernetes have access to distributed Let's Encrypt support.

The software also supports TLS and HTTPS, which are associated with the TLS connection and its basic certificates as well as routers. Users can configure the TLS configuration and obtain TLS certificates by using Let's Encrypt or through a definition used in dynamic configurations. Plus, they can configure certificates stores and TLC options. Even more, users can specify routers that are meant to handle HTTPS traffic.

Traefik Load Balancing software supports orchestration. The software categorizes each provider into four groups; Label based, Key-value based, Annotationb based, and File based. Hence, users can identify provides that have labels attached to them, those that update a key-value store with the necessary information, those that have annotations or separate objects defining the characteristics, and those with the traditional configuration file.

Recap

Traefik Load Balancing software is an open-source router that allows users to publish their microservices easily. The software gets requests on users' system behalf and identifies the components responsible for handling each of them. Plus, it automatically detects the appropriate configuration for users' services by inspecting their infrastructure and discovering necessary information and services to serve requests. Even more, Traefik supports every major cluster technology like Marathon, Mesos, AWS, Docker Swarm, Docker, and Kubernetes.