Heptio, the company that supports and advances the open Kubernetes ecosystem, open-sourced a new load balancer called Heptio Gimbal, to help enterprises manage traffic across traditional and container-based infrastructure.
Developed as a joint effort with Actapio, a subsidiary of Yahoo Japan Corporation, the Gimbal has been built on leading open source projects like Kubernetes, Heptio Contour and Envoy.
“This collaboration demonstrates the full potential of cloud native technologies and open source as a way to not only manage applications, but address broader infrastructure considerations,” said Craig McLuckie, founder and CEO of Heptio. “Kubernetes is a natural starting point, but integrating it fully into the real world is still an evolving story. Systems like Gimbal help to pragmatically bridge existing systems and new cloud native infrastructure like Kubernetes. We have been thrilled to work with Actapio to look more broadly at traffic management.”
Gimbal can enable businesses “to unify and scale the flow of network traffic into hybrid environments consisting of multiple Kubernetes clusters and traditional infrastructure technologies including OpenStack.”
Adoption of Kubernetes is rapidly increasing among the enterprises, for the acceleration in development operations. However, there are certain complexities in setting up a Kubernetes environment along with the existing infrastructure. The existing infrastructure doesn’t support dynamic and cloud native deployments.
With Gimbal, the Heptio founders aims to remove the obstacles enterprises face when adopting the Kubernetes. The Heptio was founded by two of the three engineers who developed Kubernetes project at Google.
Heptio claimed that Gimbal can eliminate the need for enterprises to make major changes to their existing systems when accommodating Kubernetes. It has been developed to rapidly integrate with Kubernetes and handle dynamic workloads.
Gimbal can be scaled up for multi-team Kubernetes clusters of all sizes. It is an API driven project and can be integrated easily with legacy and cloud native systems.
The new project provides a dynamic nature to manage Kubernetes workloads, and enables enterprises to modernize their traditional infrastructure. It helps them in having faster time-to-market at a reduced cost.
It can also enable load balancing on multi-cloud environments where Kubernetes is deployed.
“We approached Heptio to help us modernize our infrastructure with Kubernetes without ripping out legacy investments in OpenStack and other back-end systems,” said Norifumi Matsuya, CEO and President at Actapio. “Application delivery at scale is key to our business. We needed faster service discovery and canary deployment capability that provides instant rollback and performance measurement. Gimbal enables our developers to address these challenges, which at the macro-level helps them increase their productivity and optimize system performance.”
Also read: GitLab and Google Cloud collaborate to simplify Kubernetes deployment
Gimbal is currently in alpha and is available for technical preview on GitHub.
Images source: Heptio
