The Cloud Native Computing Foundation said today it has accepted Contour, an open-source ingress controller for Kubernetes, as its latest incubation-level project.

Contour was first built by a company called Heptio Inc., which was later acquired by VMware Inc. It’s designed as an easy-to-use control plane for Envoy, a popular edge and service proxy for Kubernetes-based, cloud-native applications. Kubernetes is an open-source orchestration tool that’s used to manage large clusters of software containers, which host the components of modern applications that can run on any kind of computing infrastructure.

Envoy, which was created by Lyft Inc. and is also hosted by the CNCF, runs alongside cloud-native apps and helps to abstract away the network infrastructure by providing common features in a platform-agnostic manner. Application service traffic flows via what’s called an Envoy mesh, which makes it easier for users to visualize any problems with the network, tune the its overall performance and add new features as required.

Contour makes life even easier by deploying Envoy as a reverse proxy and load balancer. It supports dynamic configuration updates and multi-team Kubernetes clusters with the ability to limit which namespaces can configure virtual hosts and Transport Layer Security credentials.

It also enables advanced load balancing strategies, said Michael Michael, a Contour maintainer and director of product management at VMware. “We believe CNCF can play a big role in shaping the future of ingress controllers, a critical part of any cloud native infrastructure,” Michael said.

Contour and Envoy are both a part of the wider Kubernetes ecosystem. “Modern distributed systems rely on networking and connectivity, making ingress controllers for Kubernetes an essential piece of architecture,” said Chris Aniszczyk, chief technology officer at the CNCF. “Contour is a logical complement to Envoy and makes it easier to consume in a cloud native, multi-team environment.”

Contour is already used in production by a number of well-known companies, including Adobe Inc. and Kintone Corp., which sells tools for no-code and low-code application development. Its elevation to the status of CNCF incubator project is an important milestone, since it should encourage much wider adoption.

Contour has an active roadmap, with new features that include support for Kubernetes Service application programming interfaces for routing services across Kubernetes clusters set to be added in the near future. Contour’s developers also have plans to add support for important Envoy features such as rate limiting and access log service.

Image: Contour