Managing network connections in container environments

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Conclusions

Reverse proxies and load balancers face completely different challenges in container environments than in conventional setups. On the one hand, the dynamics with which existing services disappear and new instances of applications spring up play a major role. On the other, it is of great importance that the connections between all these instances turn out to be far more flexible than was the case in previous environments. The container circus even invented its own software genre for this – mesh networks for Kubernetes.

Traefik turns out to be an exciting alternative to Istio, Linkerd, and the like, because it achieves very similar effects with far less technical effort and considerably lower overheads. Although a few features fall by the wayside, Traefik is well worth a look for admins of average container solutions.

In the open source version, the feature set of the solution is quite sufficient for everyday tasks, even if you as a developer or administrator would certainly want some of the features from the enterprise edition. However, Traefik gets full marks for the most important points: Traefik resources can be easily managed from within Kubernetes and are true first-class citizens. If you don't like Istio and the sidecar principle, you will probably find a good and efficient alternative in Traefik.

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