In July, we debuted a preview release of Traefik Pilot, a new SaaS platform that extends the functionality of Traefik. Today, we’re announcing that Traefik Pilot 1.0 is available and ready to connect with all Traefik instances, everywhere.
Traefik is known for its extensive compatibility with third-party vendors and its ability to adapt to multiple topologies. Traefik Pilot extends this flexibility and ease-of-use beyond the data center to provide a similar experience for the entire ecosystem of components that make up a complete application. It achieves this in a number of ways.
First, Traefik Pilot provides visibility into cloud-native architectures. Containerized applications and microservices are dynamic by nature, and they typically involve multiple network connections linking diverse components. Apps teams want to know what is happening within their installations: to visualize the history and durations of requests, to analyze changes in behavior, and to see when load has peaked and for how long. Such capabilities are essential to pinpoint the root causes of issues within the infrastructure.
While visibility is good, however, being notified or alerted is better. Traefik Pilot’s timely alerts allow operators to mitigate issues, apply processes, or analyze anomalous situations in real time, which leads to higher availability and improved end user experience.
In addition to these features, Traefik Pilot also introduces the ability for Traefik operators to create their own plugins, including custom middlewares, and easily find and share plugins with others through the Traefik Pilot online plugin catalog.
Traefik Pilot 1.0 brings a number of enhancements since the release candidate. Let’s take a look at some of the most significant ones.
Improved web UI
We heard users’ feedback from the preview release, and as a result, we have transformed the UI to make the Traefik Pilot user experience even more straightforward. We think you’ll agree that these modifications allow everyone to use Traefik Pilot in the most natural way possible.
New metrics dashboard
Would you like metrics for your Traefik instances? Just connect your instances to Traefik Pilot, and voilà!
Starting today, all instances registered in Traefik Pilot will benefit from this new feature, which allows you to diagnose and record changes in the usage of the instances or services behind Traefik through graphs spanning a day, a week, or a month.
Enhanced alerts
Traefik Pilot 1.0 offers two types of alerts. They can be enabled in your profile settings and can be delivered either by email or through a webhook.
First, Traefik Pilot can notify you when a Traefik instance no longer has access to the internet. If a connected Traefik instance fails to contact Traefik Pilot for 5 minutes, it will be marked as unreachable in the Traefik Pilot dashboard. If the instance still does not contact Traefik Pilot after 10 minutes, the instance will disappear from the dashboard and you will be notified of the lack of connectivity..
Traefik Pilot can also raise an alert when a security vulnerability is found in Traefik. Starting today, for any CVE involving Traefik, if your instance is connected to Traefik Pilot and is vulnerable, you will receive a notification through the same communication channels.
Growing plugin ecosystem
Since the preview release, Traefik Pilot has made it possible to extend the functionality of Traefik with plugins. We are proud and encouraged to see the plugins that have already been created by the community.
Plugins are a feature that opens up a wide range of possibilities with Traefik. Although this feature is still experimental, we are looking forward to seeing how the community around plugins continues to grow. To learn more about creating your own plugins, consult the developer documentation.
Onward and upward
We have a lot of ideas for the continuation of Traefik Pilot, including additional types of alerts and more.
One particular area of focus is on multi-cluster management, with the aim of making it possible to easily manage multiple datacenters. Because most (but not all) HTTP traffic is now encrypted with TLS, we plan to provide tools for Traefik Pilot to simplify certificate management.
We are also working on connecting Traefik Enterprise to Traefik Pilot, to bring all the features of Traefik Pilot to your Traefik Enterprise instances.
Finally, there will probably be one or more surprises. For now, we hope you enjoy all the features that Traefik Pilot 1.0 has to offer, and we welcome your feedback.
Useful links
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://traefik.io/blog/introducing-traefik-pilot-1-0-one-place-to-manage-all-your-traefik-instances/