Contour, an ingress controller for Kubernetes that provides a control plane for Envoy, was accepted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as an incubation-level hosted project.
“One of the most critical needs in running workloads at scale with Kubernetes is efficient and smooth traffic ingress management at the Layer 7 level. Getting an application up and running is not always the entire story; it may still need a way for users to access it,” Contour’s website states. “Filling that operational gap is what Contour was designed to do by providing a way to allow users to access applications within a Kubernetes cluster.”
Contour is built as the control plane for Envoy, the high-performance L7 proxy and load balancer. It supports dynamic configuration updates and multi-team Kubernetes clusters with the ability to limit the Namespaces that may configure virtual hosts and TLS credentials as well as provide advanced load balancing strategies, according to the developers behind the project.
With the TLS Certificate delegation, administrators can delegate wildcard certificate access more securely.
Contour can also be deployed as either a Kubernetes deployment or daemonset.
“We believe CNCF can play a big role in shaping the future of ingress controllers, a critical part of any cloud-native infrastructure,” said Michael Michael, a Contour maintainer, and director of product management at VMware. “We are excited to have a vendor neutral home, encouraging more companies and contributors to join our community, contribute, and help us deliver on the vision of Contour.”
Contour was created at Heptio in 2017 and was then acquired by VMware in 2018. The team released v1.0 in November 2019.
