The Journey to TraefikEE: Join the Free “Early Access” Program

Welcome to the first post of our journey with Traefik Enterprise Edition!

TraefikEE (Enterprise Edition) is available through a public beta test. This means that you can evaluate it for free, with an unlimited number of nodes.

This post guides you through the first steps of your TraefikEE discovery journey: From requesting the “early access” to obtaining your license key and getting started.

TraefikEE: Traefik, for the Enterprise World

Introduced during KubeCon US 2018 (check out the “Introducing Traefik Enterprise Edition” blog post), TraefikEE is built on top of Traefik and adds clustering features to satisfy the needs of Enterprise customers. All Traefik concepts apply to TraefikEE, so if you already are a Traefik user, you’re in familiar territory.

TraefikEE runs on the edge of your platform to route the traffic to your applications.

Global Architecture of Traefik Enterprise Edition

TraefikEE is composed of two planes:

  • The data plane: horizontally scalable nodes, which forward ingress traffic to your services
  • The control plane: distributed nodes, implementing the raft consensus, which watch your platform and its services, stores topology changes, and reconfigure the data plane to adapt ingress routing dynamically

This distributed architecture is the cornerstone of TraefikEE’s strengths: natively highly available, scalable, and secure.

Support Account and License

The journey begins by visiting the TraefikEE website at https://containo.us/traefikee, and opting in to the program by clicking the “Early Access” button, and filling the “Get My Key” form.

If you are not a robot, fill the form
(A voice in the background): I’ve been told it is free. Why should I give you my personal information?
Containous: We need a way to communicate together, so the form creates a “Support Account” for you in our ticketing system. So you can raise requests if you get any issue with TraefikEE, and we can send you information about update.

Once you’ve filled out the form, look for a “Welcome to Containous” e-mail sent from [email protected] in your mail’s inbox (or, possibly junk folder). Click on the link it contains to validate your account. You will be prompted to set a (strong) password: you know the story.

Once your account is validated with a (strong) password, the system will generate a TraefikEE license and send you an e-mail entitled “Your license key” (it may take a couple minutes) which will contain instructions.

Knock, knock, you got an email!
(A voice in the background): I never received the email. It’s probably tagged as spam by my organization’s mail system.
Containous: Instead of the email, you can also browse the customer portal at https://containous.zendesk.com/hc/en-us , select the button “Check my existing requests / License” and open the request named “Your license key”.

Get your license and put it somewhere “secure” (e.g. an encrypted system). For this post series, we store the license in a file, encrypted into a Keybase.io volume:

$ cat /keybase/private/dduportal/traefikee-license
xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx

That’s all folks, you can get started with the installation from the documentation.

On the next post “The Journey to Traefik Enterprise Edition: Product Evaluation”, we will install TraefikEE on your machine and take a tour of its features.


This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://containo.us/blog/the-journey-to-traefik-enterprise-edition-join-the-early-access-program-b73e07d62f30/