Traefik Labs announced the general availability of Traefik Hub, the industry's first Kubernetes-native API management for publishing, securing, and managing APIs with support for Traefik and third-party ingress controllers including NGINX, HAProxy, Ambassador, and many others.

As software and applications become more complex and interconnected, the importance of APIs continues to grow. APIs provide a standardized way for different software applications to communicate and share data, which makes it easier for businesses to integrate different technologies and streamline their operations. However, traditional API management solutions struggle to keep up with the demands of cloud-native environments that are highly dynamic and require rapid changes to be made to APIs in response to changing business needs. At the same time, cloud-native environments require APIs to be highly scalable, secure, and automated to ensure that they can handle the demands of modern digital products.

Announced as a beta in April, Traefik Hub addresses the challenges and limitations of traditional API management by providing a true Kubernetes-native experience with full GitOps compliance for simplicity, automation, and security. With Traefik Hub, engineers can continue to use their preferred ingress controller along with other test and security technologies to build great APIs and applications.

"Through numerous discussions and user surveys, we validated and concluded the dire need for a modern API management solution that caters to the growing Kubernetes and cloud native user community," said Emile Vauge, founder and CEO, Traefik Labs. "Given our company's track record and DNA in solving similar intractable problems, we felt compelled to rise to this new challenge and deliver a best-in-class Kubernetes-native API management solution."

Traefik Hub has been built from the ground up to deliver outcomes aligned with the following design principles and goals:

1. Freedom of Choice: Traefik Hub offers choice across multiple dimensions: users can choose any leading ingress controller, including Traefik Proxy or third-party solutions like NGINX. Users can also standardize their Traefik Hub installation across multiple deployment environments, including on-premises, managed Kubernetes in multi-cloud, and edge. Furthermore, the Traefik Hub architecture is both open and modular, providing integration capabilities with third-party API design, testing, mocking, ingress, and security solutions, while leveraging industry best practices and standards such as OpenTelemetry and OpenAPI specification (OAS)
2. DevOps-first Mindset: Traefik Hub is a modern solution that embodies a DevOps-first mindset. Initial configurations and ongoing changes can be expressed as code and deployed through GitOps and CI/CD friendly workflows.
3. Security-first Mindset: Any modern API management system would be incomplete without addressing the notion of APIs becoming a new attack vector and ways to mitigate these emerging attacks. Traefik Hub offers robust security features such as Role Based Access Control (RBAC), and support for modern industry-standard authentication and authorization mechanisms like OAuth 2.0 and JSON Web Tokens (JWT). Furthermore, Traefik Hub's open and modular architecture offers integration capabilities with leading third-party API security solutions to provide additional layers of protection.
4. Kubernetes-native Approach: Traefik Hub provides a Kubernetes-native approach through deep integration with the Kubernetes API. Starting with the auto-discovery of existing microservices, Traefik Hub leverages familiar and powerful Kubernetes objects and primitives such as Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs), labels, and selectors to create, manage, and secure APIs at scale.
5. Quick Time to Value: Traefik Hub control plane provides a simple and intuitive point-and-click experience for users who are just getting started with publishing APIs in a single or multi-cluster Kubernetes environment, while also giving advanced Kubernetes users access to its full automation and GitOps capabilities. This dual operating model accelerates Kubernetes-native adoption and maximizes business agility, giving organizations unprecedented speed and scale in launching new APIs and services.