🥇Introducing Contour: directing traffic to applications in Kubernetes

We are excited to share the news that Contour has been placed in the project incubator by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

If you haven't heard of Contour yet — it's a simple and scalable open-source ingress controller for routing traffic to applications deployed in Kubernetes.

We will take a detailed look at how it works and showcase the 'roadmap' for development at the upcoming conferences Kubecon and CloudNativeCon Europe.

In this article, we invite you to explore how Contour works. We'll explain what it means for the project to be accepted into CNCF, and share our plans for the future development of the project.

KubeCon and CloudNativeCon conferences gather enthusiasts of cutting-edge technologies and engineers interested not only in further education but also in advancing cloud computing. The events feature hands-on experts and key developers from popular projects like Kubernetes, Prometheus, gRPC, Envoy, OpenTracing, and others.

All attention on Ingress

To begin with, an introduction. The Kubernetes community has already defined how to approach the challenges of launching workloads and providing access from workloads to storage. However, there is still room for innovation in the areas of networking and connectivity. The primary, and indeed very important, task is to deliver external traffic into the cluster. In Kubernetes, this is known as Ingress, which is precisely what Contour does. It is a tool that you can easily use in the cluster to deliver traffic as needed, while also being functionally prepared for the future as your Kubernetes cluster grows.

Technically, Contour works by deploying Envoy to provide reverse proxy and load balancer functionality. It initially supports dynamic configuration updates and can scale to multiteam Kubernetes clusters, offering various load balancing strategies.

There are numerous alternatives for running an Ingress Controller in Kubernetes, but Contour is unique in that it solely focuses on this task, doing it with high performance while also considering security and the ability to operate in a multi-user environment.

Although you can deploy service mesh To address this issue, it would mean an additional complication for your cluster. Contour, on the other hand, offers Ingress functionality without needing to rely on a larger service mesh structure — though it can work with one if necessary. This proposes a sort of gradual transition to Ingress, which quickly captured the interest of many users.

The Strength of CNCF Support

Contour, created in late 2017 by Heption developers, reached version 1.0 in November 2019 and now boasts a community of 600 members on Slack, 300 contributors, as well as 90 committers and 5 maintainers. One significant fact is that it is implemented by various companies and organizations, including Adobe, Kinvolk, Kintone, PhishLabs, and Replicated. Recognizing that users are deploying Contour in production and knowing we have a stable community, CNCF decided that Contour could move directly into the incubator, bypassing the sandbox level.

This is very important to us, as we view such an invitation as confirmation that we are a sustainable, welcoming, and open community that aligns with CNCF's technical goals. Additionally, Contour integrates well with other projects in the ecosystem, such as Kubernetes and Envoy.

We hope that as more people join us, the diversity and pace of new feature additions will significantly increase. We will continue to release versions monthly, ensuring that users won't have to wait long for new features, bug fixes, and security improvements.

Contribution to the Kubernetes Ecosystem

In the near future we want to gather community requests for new features. Some of these requests, such as support for external authentication, have been anticipated by users for quite some time, but we have only now gained the resources to address them. Such tasks can also be realized only with substantial feedback from the community.

Other things we have planned to implement in the near future include:

We have also begun considering support for UDPContour is an L7 Ingress Controller, but some of our users want to deploy applications in Kubernetes that do not support HTTP (for example, VOIP and telephony applications). Typically, these applications use UDP, so we want to expand our plans to meet those needs.

We we strive to share what we learned while developing our Ingress Controller with the community, thereby helping to improve data routing from outside into the cluster for the next generation service APIs Kubernetes.

Learn more and join us!

Want to know more about Contour, including a clear understanding of how the project works and what the team hopes to achieve since we joined CNCF — visit our presentation at KubeCon on August 20, 2020, at 1:00 PM CEST, we would be happy to see you.

If that’s not possible — feel free to join any of the community meetings, which take place on Tuesdays, there are recordings of the meetings. You can also subscribe to the newsletter Contour, during working hours you can ask questions or work on pull requests with someone who knows the project well in real time. Want to see Contour in action — message us on Slack or send an email to the mailing list.

Finally, if you want to contribute, we would be happy to welcome you to our ranks. Check out our documentation, talk to us in Slack, or start with any of our Good First Issues. We are also open to any feedback you may want to share.

To learn more about Contour and other cloud technologies, consider remote participation in KubeCon and CloudNativeCon EU, which will take place from August 17-20, 2020.