Routing in a Multi-Platform Data Center: From VMs to Kubernetes, via Ambassador

At Datawire, we are seeing more organizations migrating to their “next-generation” cloud-native platform built around Docker and Kubernetes. However, this migration doesn’t happen overnight. Instead, we see the proliferation of multi-platform data centers and cloud environments where applications span both VMs and containers. In these data centers, the Ambassador API gateway is being used as a central point of ingress, consolidating authentication, rate limiting, and other cross-cutting operational concerns.

This article is the first in a series on how to use Ambassador as a multi-platform ingress solution when incrementally migrating applications to Kubernetes. We’ve added sample Terraform code to the Ambassador Pro Reference Architecture GitHub repo which enables the creation of a multi-platform “sandbox” infrastructure on Google Cloud Platform. This will allow you to spin up a Kubernetes cluster and several VMs, and practice routing traffic from Ambassador to the existing applications.