VMblog recently spoke with Emile Vauge, co-founder and CEO of Traefik Labs, to learn more about the company and what's happening with technologies like Traefik Proxy and Traefik Hub.

VMblog:  Can you please introduce Traefik Labs, the company you founded?

Emile Vauge:  Of course. My name is Emile Vauge, and I am a software developer that became an entrepreneur by accident. A few years ago, I needed to build an infrastructure that could deploy thousands of microservices, and I needed to find a way to manage network traffic automation. I started dreaming of a dynamic reverse proxy, natively integrated with orchestrators, which didn't exist at the time. This led to me creating Traefik Proxy, an open source reverse proxy written in Go, in 2015. I launched Traefik Labs to develop the product into the fully automated reverse proxy and load balancer that has become. Today, Traefik Proxy has over 3 billion downloads, 39K stars on GitHub, and 700 contributors.

VMblog:  Open source is at the heart of Traefik Labs since its inception. What does it mean to be an open source company?

Vauge:  I knew from the beginning that I wanted Traefik Proxy to tap into the vision and support that an open source community can provide. Open source truly is the best way to create a great product. Open source products are built for and by the public, and being an open source company means interacting with community users and contributors at every step of the way. It involves being transparent and clean in all aspects, as open source projects maintain significant public exposure. All in all, this creates an accelerated feedback loop between users and developers that leads to a superior product.

VMblog:  Traefik Proxy counts over 3 billion downloads and is in the top 10 of the most downloaded projects from Docker Hub. To what do you attribute this success?

Vauge:  At the heart of this answer is the simple truth that Traefik Proxy is a great product that solves an acute need. It allows teams deploying microservices to route traffic with simplicity, and it integrates with your existing infrastructure components, configuring itself automatically and dynamically. But having a great product is not enough. Traefik Proxy has been a part of the cloud native revolution from the beginning and is a leading player driving its advancement. Today, every developer working with containers recognizes Traefik and its innate simplicity. It is a brand built, driven, and loved by the community.

VMblog:  Traefik Proxy has a long history of open governance and community contributions. How is the growth of Traefik Proxy led by the community?

Vauge:  It's easy to build open source projects when the community is small enough for everyone to know each other. It becomes much harder when the community consists of many thousands of people. Traefik Proxy grew very quickly in adoption, and the number of PRs, questions, and issues coming from the community became overwhelming. We had no choice but to create strong structures to handle requests. We automated processes to merge PRs, welcomed external contributors, and hired maintainers to join the project. Clear documentation, processes, and governance have been absolutely crucial. Most importantly, we prioritized the way we communicate our roadmap. Anyone interested in joining the community can visit our open roadmap to understand and interact with the ways Traefik Proxy might develop.

VMblog:  Your mission at Traefik Labs is to make networking boring. What is the next step?

Vauge:  The market is continuing to mature, and the next big challenge involves enabling multi-cluster Kubernetes so companies can scale. This is why we recently launched Traefik Hub, a cloud native networking platform that helps companies publish and secure containers from the origin up to  the edge instantly. This is becoming increasingly necessary for companies hoping to bring computing power closer to the end-user, so applications can become faster and more performant. Traefik Hub provides developers with a centralized dashboard through which they can scale into the edge, across different regions and multiple clusters. It allows any developer with or without strong skills in networking to publish services anywhere. While Traefik Proxy made management of the reverse proxy and ingress control boring, Traefik Hub will make multi-cluster Kubernetes boring.

##