With its popular Traefik software crossing the 2 billion download mark, cloud-native networking leader Containous changed its name today to Traefik Labs and unveiled its latest product, Traefik Pilot, taking the first steps in an ambitious plan to build an open-source networking stack for the microservices era.

"What the wire is to electricity, we want to be for the cloud," said Traefik Labs founder and CEO Emile Vauge. "Right now enterprises need many different tools to manage application connectivity, from ingress control to service mesh to global load balancing. We're creating a simple, unified stack that can be used to manage the entire network across data centers, on-premises servers and public clouds all the way out to the edge."

Traefik Labs developed the Traefik application proxy as a cloud-native alternative to traditional solutions, which lacked features like service discovery, automation and autoscaling-all of which were important to enterprises adopting microservices. Traefik quickly became popular for its ease of use, open source architecture and native support for cluster technologies including Docker, Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, Mesos and many more.

"We created Traefik because we needed application networking that could handle the complexity and scale of the cloud. It turned out, a lot of other people wanted the same thing: open source networking built from the ground up for DevOps and microservices. Since Traefik is at the heart of everything we do, it was natural to make it the heart of our identity as well," Vauge said.  

Traefik has won the trust of some of the world's largest online businesses, including Conde Nast, eBay Classifieds and Mailchimp, amassing 30,000 stars on GitHub.

"I wish all networking software were designed as well as Traefik," said Pierre Bourgeois, DevOps engineer at Worldline. "You definitely can configure the most advanced ingress rules you may need; sometimes you have to get into the details, but most of the time you just need your edge router to work-especially with the cloud and microservices, where environments are constantly changing. With Traefik, I don't waste time configuring settings. Traefik finds my services and configures itself. In terms of usability and performance, it's head and shoulders over any popular solution I've seen."

Building on the success of Traefik, Traefik Labs has developed a range of products extending the capabilities of its core projects. The complete list includes:

• Traefik Proxy (‘Traefik'), the original open-source application proxy for cloud-native platforms, which provides load balancing, API gateway services and ingress control.
• Traefik Mesh (formerly Maesh), an open-source service mesh featuring Traefik Labs' signature ease of use and a unique per-node architecture.
• Traefik Enterprise, Traefik Labs' flagship open-core offering, which bundles Traefik Proxy and Traefik Mesh along with additional features for scale, security, support and deployment.
• Traefik Pilot (new), a centralized SaaS control center and plug-in hub for Traefik servers.

"The growth of cloud-native architectures made Traefik Pilot essential," Vauge said. "Enterprises aren't just experimenting with containers and microservices anymore. They're in full production, with clusters around the world. Traefik Pilot makes it easy to run Traefik as it was meant to be run: at cloud scale."

Traefik Pilot provides observability, security and monitoring of Traefik's cloud-native application proxy. Users can quickly set alerts and see real-time reports on the health and status of each Traefik instance, while Traefik Pilot automatically checks for common vulnerabilities and exposure (CVE) bulletins and flags any that might need attention.

Traefik Pilot's innovative new plug-in hub also enables anyone to create, publish and install add-on packages that extend Traefik's functionality. Developers can write plug-ins in Go and share them with the community as easily as publishing them on GitHub. Traefik Pilot users can find plug-ins directly from the catalog without compiling a single line of code.

"Traefik Pilot opens up Traefik so developers can tailor it to their own needs and make the entire platform more capable," Vauge said. "What makes Traefik powerful and even fun to use is that it provides both simplicity and flexibility. Traefik automates complexity away, and Traefik Pilot makes the networking stack infinitely extensible."

Over time, Traefik Labs plans to make Traefik Pilot the control center for the entire Traefik networking stack.

"Without the right tools and approach, networking in the cloud native world is notoriously complex," said Greg Muscarella, VP of Automation and Operations Products at Nutanix. "There's a real need for a cloud-native network stack that fits together seamlessly, which is why our new Kubernetes-based multicloud PaaS, Karbon Platform Services, offers Traefik as an integrated service that developers can easily leverage for content-based routing, load balancing and SSL/TLS termination. Traefik Labs' strong focus on simplicity and ease of use aligns with Nutanix's goal of enabling enterprises to fast-track their cloud-native journey."