Deployments and Data-Clients

Edge HTTP Routing

Edge HTTP routing is the first hit to your production HTTP loadbalancer. Skipper can serve this well and reliably in production since 2016.

On the edge you want to dispatch incoming HTTP requests to your backends, which could be a microservice architecture.

In this deployment mode you might have 100k HTTP routes, which are used in production and modified by many parties.

To support this scenario we have the etcd dataclient.

Etcd is a distributed database.

TODO: why we use ETCD for this purpose

Kubernetes Ingress

Kubernetes Ingress is the component responsible to route traffic into your Kubernetes cluster. As deployer you can define an ingress object and an ingress controller will make sure incoming traffic gets routed to her backend service as defined. Skipper supports this scenario with the Kubernetes dataclient and is used in production since end of 2016.

Skipper as ingress controller does not need to have any file configuration or anything external which configures Skipper. Skipper automatically finds Ingress objects and configures routes automatically, without reloading. The only requirement is to target all traffic you want to serve with Kubernetes to a loadbalancer pool of Skippers. This is a clear advantage over other ingress controllers like nginx, haproxy or envoy.

Read more about Skipper’s Kubernetes dataclient.

Demos / Talks

In demos you may want to show arbitrary hello world applications. You can easily describe html or json output on the command line with the route-string dataclient.

Simple Routes File

The most static deployment that is known from apache, nginx or haproxy is write your routes into a file and start your http server. This is what the Eskip file dataclient is about.