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**Justin Searls:** Okay. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** ...and I'm hoping, more importantly, a fun one. I'm curious how you describe, according to you, which is the most impressive Olympic event you've seen come out of Tokyo so far? |
**Justin Searls:** Alright, I study Japanese language, and so the only reason I have an answer to this is because I watch the Japanese news every time I'm on my bike. And so the most impressive thing that I saw was a 13-year-old young woman from Osaka winning the gold medal in skateboarding... And to see the level of e... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That's great. I was thinking something else, but maybe we drop that in the show notes, because it's too funny... I know that you could not have described that, but that's what I was hoping would happen. That's okay, it'll be in the show notes, you can check it out. This has been a pleasure, Justin. I ... |
**Justin Searls:** Absolutely. Take care. Thank you. |
• Traefik was created to solve a problem with automating reverse proxy configuration in microservices |
• Emile Vauge started working on Traefik as a side project 6 years ago to automate the rooting and networking aspects of 2,000 microservices |
• The project's success was unexpected, becoming popular after being featured on Hacker News |
• Early versions of Traefik supported Mesos, Docker, Consul, Etcd, and Marathon, with Kubernetes support added later |
• Service discovery in Traefik is designed to handle the complexity of large-scale deployments like the original 2,000 microservices project |
• Building a strong community around Traefik was crucial to its success, but also complex to manage |
• The project's approachable documentation and graphics were well-received by users |
• Traefik has a high volume of alphas and betas due to its use of continuous deployment and automated release generation |
• Discussion of CI/CD pipeline evolution and adoption by Traefik |
• Challenge of sustaining a large community with an internal team moving quickly |
• Gap between 1.x and 2 branch versions of Traefik, including lessons learned from revamping the project architecture |
• Importance of connecting company goals to community needs and values |
• Strategies for reconciling differences between Traefik the company, product, and community, including: |
+ Creating a private group for active contributors (ambassadors) |
+ Developing a process for handling community input and contributions daily |
• Importance of shipping being only the beginning of a long process |
• Use of GitHub as the main source of truth for tracking issues and PRs |
• Implementation of GitHub Actions for automating processes |
• Mymirca ant colony concept used to map tools to tasks |
• Automation of documentation and versioning using custom tools |
• Release cycle with 3-4 minor releases per year, following semver versioning system |
• Fast pipeline for bug fixes and vulnerability patches |
• Priority zero fix has to ship today in two versions |
• Minor releases focus on latest version for backward compatibility |
• No new features added in patch releases, only bug fixes |
• Support for minor releases is until next minor release plus a few months |
• Release calendar not used due to external contributions and potential changes |
• Major version bump requires significant architecture changes or backward-incompatible features |
• Semantic versioning applied to API, config, and plugins with additions allowed but no changes |
• Behavior of internal components can change, but must be intentional or have flag options |
• Plugins integration is new to Traefik and lacks strong versioning mechanism |
• Two ways to use plugins: published on marketplace with hash-based versioning or private plugins without version checks |
• Traefik exposes APIs that plugins can use, which are part of public API subject to backwards-compatibility requirements |
• Long-tail latencies in proxy requests, potentially due to TLS issues or specific ciphers |
• Traefik can help understand request slowness through distributed tracing and real-time metrics export |
• Using Traefik as a reverse proxy and also for services themselves, not just apps |
• CRDs (Custom Resource Definitions) needed to configure Traefik in Kubernetes context, but specifics depend on use case |
• Future pain point: automation of all networking space due to microservices growth, beyond just reverse proxy automation |
• Kubernetes cluster management and scalability challenges |
• Need for orchestration of multiple Kubernetes clusters |
• Traefik Labs' vision for handling distributed systems with complex networking |
• Kubernetes federation as a solution for managing multiple clusters |
• Challenges in implementing high availability, blue/green deployments, and end-to-end security across multiple clusters |
• Traefik's features and capabilities, including LetsEncrypt integration and auto-discovery |
• Comparison of Traefik to other tools like Ingress NGINX and Cert Manager |
• Importance of community engagement and feedback in product development and success |
• Discussion of a past meeting or conversation |
• Plans for a future meeting or discussion |
• Appreciation and gratitude expressed by both parties |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Emile, tell us, how did the Traefik idea start? |
**Emile Vauge:** Yeah, it started six years ago. At that time I was a developer... And I was working on a microservices platform which was quite complex. I needed to manage 2,000 microservices. It was microservices where early there were not that many tools to handle microservices at that time, and 2,000 microservices ... |
So that's really what was the pain point at that time - automate the reverse proxy. That's something I started to work on, but it was a side project. So yeah, I started to do a few lines of code in Go, then \[unintelligible 00:03:56.21\] and then I was just passionate about it. |
\[04:01\] A few months later I had something, I had a project, and it was Traefik. I decided to open source it, and I was like "Yeah, maybe it will interest a few people in the world, because maybe a few people will hit the same pain that I did." But I was not expecting anything. |
Surprisingly, the success was here. The project was on the front page of Hacker News, and it changed everything. So it was completely unexpected. From a side project it went to a real open source project with a community around it, with external maintainers, external contributors in only a few weeks... So that really w... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That is a great story. So what I'm hearing is it started as a problem that you had, and apparently many others had as well... I think. That's one of the reasons why it became so popular, right? You've definitely hit something that others had, too. 2,000 microservices? I can't imagine that. That sounds... |
**Emile Vauge:** Yeah, at that time it was kind of crazy... And early. At that time, of course, Kubernetes was not even here; it was only the beginning of Docker. And so we were using Docker and Mesos, which was already production-ready, and you had already a few companies with big deployment on Mesos, like Twitter or ... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I remember as well Apple was a big Mesos user... |
**Emile Vauge:** Exactly, yeah. So yeah, we started with Mesos. The first version of Traefik did have Mesos support with Marathon, and also Consul, Etcd, Docker... A few things. But of course, Kubernetes came later. I think a year after we added Kubernetes support, and... Yeah, it changed everything, once Kubernetes wa... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. And also, what I'm realizing now is that the service discovery - that Traefik is like a first-class citizen (it works so well) - must be coming from this, where you have 2,000 micro-- like, how do you even configure them? How do you make sure the config reloads instant... |
So since you started Traefik in 2015, what things did you get right? |
**Emile Vauge:** I guess building an active community around the project from day one was definitely something we did right... And today I learned that it was not easy to sustain it. So yes, we started a project and some people came to contribute and became full-time maintainers, and the community is super-strong on Tr... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I always thought that it was those graphics and drawings which were really good. I always remembered those; I was sure that the success was basically that. By the way, who did those drawings? Was it you, by any chance? |
**Emile Vauge:** \[08:05\] No, it's a friend of mine who is also a developer... But he's doing some design as a side project, so yeah. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Traefik was so approachable because of that, and I'm pretty sure that that mentality was seen throughout everything else - polite, correct, inclusive, but also approachable. And I think those drawings captured it really well. So the thing which really stuck with me over the years is how consistent the... |
Okay, so - I don't know many projects that have hundreds and hundreds of alphas and betas, but Traefik is one of them. I went to look at the repository and I counted 500 alphas and 800 betas, and some of the alphas and betas were being cut and made available multiple times per day. What is the story behind that? Why so... |
**Emile Vauge:** That's a good question, and I think you are the first one to count everything on the repository... \[laughs\] So there is one good reason - before the 1.0 we were using a continuous deployment solution, and basically every commit, every PR was generating a new beta. So everything was automated. And we ... |
And then later we started to structure a bit more the release cycle, and we decided that it was time to just release only, for example, three or four big releases in a year, because it was easier... Now that it was in 1.0, it was easier for a company to manage the release and the upgrades. So yeah, that was it. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I mean, that's exactly what I was expecting, and this is one of the signs, if you do continuous delivery, continuous integration right. You have many, many artifacts. Now, you may choose to make those artifacts publicly available, or they can be more hidden, but you will have those artifacts, regardle... |
And the structure thing makes perfect sense. Once you get a bit more structured, once more people get involved, you want to reduce some of that noise, or at least separate it. So that makes perfect sense. So what did you use at the time for the CI/CD system, do you remember? |
**Emile Vauge:** Yes. And that's an interesting topic, because we changed at least three or four times the chain. We adapted. I think we started with Travis plus Docker Hub. Pretty basic. And after a few months we \[unintelligible 00:11:26.27\] were lasting like 50 minutes. We were hitting the \[unintelligible 00:11:33... |
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