Written by: Lynn Cadet
Edited by: Lillian Castro
TL; DR: The tech landscape waits for no one, and it can be challenging for developers and businesses to keep up. Ambassador helps dev teams stay ahead with its cloud-native solutions for Kubernetes environments. Its developer-friendly tools, Telepresence and Edge Stack, allow teams to iterate faster and manage their API gateway with scalability and security. We spoke with Lori Marshall, VP of Product Management at Ambassador Labs, about agility and innovation, the need for speed, and how Ambassador helps developers meet their goals.
Technology has evolved at an unbelievable pace, taking us on a wild, seemingly never-ending rollercoaster of ups and downs. It’s been amazing to witness how quickly our society has adapted to the new additions and easily lets go when a popular tech craze disappears, i.e., the Vine app. With so many twists and turns, looking back over the last decade may induce whiplash if you’re not careful.
Tech advancements that seemed like wishful thinking or pipe dreams have arrived faster than we thought. AI and Augmented Reality were things I always saw on TV and in Sci-Fi movies, but I never thought I would see this early in my lifetime. But here we are, with products such as ChatGPT and Apple Vision Pro.
Although it may seem a lot for the average consumer to keep up with, the challenge is even greater for the developers creating solutions around these new technological arrivals. Remaining agile in the face of an ever-changing tech landscape requires resilience, high productivity, and the right tools. Ambassador Labs creates developer-friendly tools to help teams innovate and streamline their development life cycles.
“We want to simplify the microservices life cycle. So Ambassador provides the best-in-class Kubernetes API gateway solution and our telepresence productivity tools for developers to help harness their full potential on that Kubernetes journey,” said Lori Marshall, VP of Product Management at Ambassador Labs.
Ambassador allows developers to adapt and meet new tech opportunities with confidence. Its solutions help dev teams go to market faster by streamlining and enhancing the development process. Ambassador’s cloud- and Kubernetes-native products, Edge Stack and Telepresence, boost developer productivity and accelerate the dev pipeline with valuable capabilities.
Ambassador Helps Dev Teams Stay Agile
Agility has become a vital attribute for businesses. The tech world waits for no one, and frequent groundbreaking tech releases have become commonplace in today’s landscape. So DevOps teams must stay ahead of trends to succeed.
“In our fast-paced environment today, when the technology changes, agile and innovative DevOps teams can help adapt their processes and products fast to meet the new demands and capitalize on those opportunities,” said Lori.
Ambassador helps DevOps teams stay agile and innovative throughout the development life cycle. One way it does this is by accelerating time to market. Its tools allow teams to reduce bottlenecks and deliver higher-quality products in less time. This benefit of speed is crucial to helping businesses stay competitive and meet customer expectations.
“If you think about it from a DevOps perspective, continuous improvement is also something you want to look at. Building a culture of continuous improvement helps because you’re always trying to ask the questions: are we doing the right thing? Are trying to strive for that excellence,” said Lori.
Lori also advised DevOps teams to encourage employee engagement. She said it can help boost productivity, which in turn can improve agility and innovation within the organization.
“If you allow your DevOps teams to have that freedom, it helps people know that they have a voice. They can experiment with new technologies and see where their impact of work is most used,” said Lori.
Telepresence Links Local and Remote Environments
Ambassador’s Telepresence solution supports remote to local development. Telepresence helps developers streamline and accelerate iteration, so they can make changes and see them immediately without deploying to a remote environment.
“Telepresence allows developers to run their code locally on their development machines, while seamlessly connecting to remote services and resources. So this setup provides instant feedback on code changes without the need to deploy to a remote environment,” said Lori.
With this tool, Ambassador enables teams to quickly iterate features and testing functionality without the overhead of the traditional development processes. Its capabilities also help simplify collaboration. Users can share their work in progress for easy feedback and do so in a local Kubernetes environment to make changes with confidence.
“Telepresence enables developers to debug their code locally, using familiar debugging tools and techniques. They can set breakpoints, inspect variables, and step through the code as if they’re running locally, which makes it easier to identify and fix issues during the deployment,” said Lori.
Telepresence seamlessly connects users’ local environments and preferred tools to the microservices and test databases they rely on. So developers can streamline their entire local development process with Telepresence. They can code and ship faster, reducing time spent on manual tasks.
“It’s greatly reducing the troubleshooting time when something goes wrong. So from a pain point perspective, we’re trying to help the developer experience. And everybody wants to think about reducing cloud costs. So we’re trying to address all those things with the Telepresence tool,” said Lori.
Best-in-Class Kubernetes API Gateway for Easy Scaling
Ambassador recently gained recognition as a Niche player in the inaugural G2 Winter 2024 Grid Report for API Management. Its Edge Stack tool helps users manage their APIs with security and scalability in a Kubernetes environment. Edge Stack is also cloud-native, enabling users to harness the most out of cloud computing resources.
“Cloud-native applications have become ubiquitous due to the number of benefits, including scalability, flexibility, and resilience. These applications are designed to leverage cloud computing resources and are built using containerization, microservices architecture, and then those DevOps principles,” said Lori.
Ambassador provides users with an API gateway solution with Edge Stack. Lori said API gateways are crucial in helping dev teams stay agile. Edge Stack offers users flexible Kubernetes management with an ingress controller and scalability for handling API traffic.
“DevOps teams can easily scale their APIs based on their demand, ensuring the applications can handle fluctuations in traffic without downtime or performance issues. Edge Stack simplifies traffic management to ensure high availability, resilience, and uptime,” said Lori.
Although Edge Stack focuses on API management, the Ambassador team also seeks to make its existing tools hone in on the API development side. AI is one addition the Ambassador team is considering.
“We’re looking at how we can help our customers get faster. How can we use AI to help in that API development life cycle? It’s an exciting time to think about it. If you think about even 10 years ago, most of these things didn’t exist. Now they’re a reality,” said Lori.
