README.md

Gimbal

Maintainers: Heptio

Overview

Heptio Gimbal is a layer-7 load balancing platform built on Kubernetes, the Envoy proxy, and Heptio's Kubernetes Ingress controller, Contour. It provides a scalable, multi-team, and API-driven ingress tier capable of routing Internet traffic to multiple upstream Kubernetes clusters and to traditional infrastructure technologies such as OpenStack.

Gimbal was developed out of a joint effort between Heptio and Yahoo Japan Corporation's subsidiary, Actapio, to modernize Yahoo Japan’s infrastructure with Kubernetes, without affecting legacy investments in OpenStack.

At launch, Gimbal can discover services from Kubernetes and OpenStack clusters, but we expect to support additional platforms in the future.

Common Use Cases

• Organizations with multiple Kubernetes clusters that need a way to manage ingress traffic across clusters
• Organizations with Kubernetes and OpenStack infrastructure that need a consistent load balancing tier
• Organizations that want to enable their development teams to safely self-manage their routing configuration
• Organizations with bare metal or on-premises infrastructure that want cloud-like load balancing capabilities

Prerequisites

Gimbal is tested with Kubernetes clusters running version 1.9 and later but should work with any cluster running version 1.7 or later.

Gimbal's service discovery is currently tested with Kubernetes 1.7+ and OpenStack Mitaka.

Get started

Deployment of Gimbal is outlined in the deployment section, which includes quick start applications.

Documentation

Documentation for all the Gimbal components can be found in the docs directory.

Known Limitations

• Upstream Kubernetes Pods and OpenStack VMs must be routable from the Gimbal load balancing cluster
  • No support for Kubernetes clusters with overlay networks
  • We are looking for feedback on community requirements to design a solution. One potential option is to use one GRE tunnel per upstream cluster. Feedback welcome here!
• The Kubernetes Ingress API is limited and insecure
  • Only one backend per route
  • Anyone can modify route rules for a domain
  • More complex load balancing features like weighting and strategy are not supported
  • Gimbal & Contour will solve this with a new IngressRoute CRD

Troubleshooting

If you encounter any problems that the documentation does not address, please file an issue or talk to us on the Kubernetes Slack team channel #gimbal

Contributing

Thanks for taking the time to join our community and start contributing!

Feedback and discussion is available on the mailing list.

Before you start

• Please familiarize yourself with the Code of Conduct before contributing.
• See CONTRIBUTING.md for instructions on the developer certificate of origin that we require.

Pull Requests

• We welcome pull requests. Fee free to dig through the issues and jump in.