Traefik Labs has announced the general availability of Traefik Hub, a Kubernetes-native API management service designed to streamline the process of publishing, securing, and managing APIs. The company, founded in 2016 by Emile Vauge, initially concentrated on its open-source projects: Traefik Proxy and Mesh—a cloud-native reverse-proxy solution and service mesh.
In 2015, Vauge worked as a developer and DevOps consultant after tenures at Lyra Network, Airbus, Thales Communications, and Nortel. He needed a solution for making thousands of microservices accessible over the internet, and existing options fell short of his requirements.
Vauge recounted his journey at KubeCon Amsterdam, saying, I started to work on my own stuff and I ended up by open sourcing Traefik—a reverse proxy built from scratch for microservices and containers. Front page of Hacker News. It was an unexpected great success, which led me to found Traefik Labs the company a few months later.
Today, Traefik has surpassed 3 billion downloads, and the company employs 40 people. The Traefik project's community boasts over 700 contributors, and the organization has raised more than $11 million in funding from the likes of Balderton Capital, Kima Ventures, 360 Capital, and Elaia.
Traefik Labs has consistently emphasized simplicity. One of its early slogans was “Making networking boring.” The launch of Traefik Hub aligns with this principle. Traefik Proxy users already used the platform as a unified ingress and API gateway, but it wasn't initially built with API management in mind. Many users sought alternatives to their monolithic API management solutions, which often clashed with the DevOps philosophy and cloud-native platforms adopted by modern enterprises.
Traefik Hub emerges as a Kubernetes-native API management solution compatible with not only Traefik but also other proxies like NGINX, HAProxy, Ambassador, and more. Offering this flexibility allows users to standardize on Traefik Hub for API management without replacing their existing investments. As a result, publishing an API from any established Kubernetes microservice should be a matter of just a few clicks.
Security is also a priority for Traefik Hub, offering support for role-based access controls and authentication and authorization via OAuth 2.0 and JSON Web Tokens.
Vauge sees an enormous opportunity in the API management space, stating, In 2015 I saw an opportunity to build a new modern reverse proxy model — that's because there was a need. I was missing that. And that's exactly the same [in today's API space]. There is a huge market and there is a big need. We think that there is a huge opportunity because existing API management solutions are not well-suited to the cloud-native world. They are too heavy, too expensive and most importantly, they were built before the cloud-native revolution.
Platforms like Traefik Hub and AppMaster exemplify the growing interest in simplifying and modernizing development processes. With the introduction of serverless technology and low-code to no-code platforms, businesses and developers strive to stay competitive and rapidly deploy scalable solutions.
