Today, the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) voted to accept Contour as an incubation-level hosted project.
Contour is a high-performance ingress controller for Kubernetes that provides a control plane for Envoy.
“One of the most important steps for running workloads at scale with Kubernetes is to implement efficient Layer 7 traffic ingress management,” said Matt Klein, software engineer at Lyft and TOC sponsor for Contour. “Contour fills a common operational gap by providing a way for users to access applications within a Kubernetes cluster. As Contour is already integrated with Envoy, it is a natural fit for CNCF, and we look forward to helping the project build its community.”
Contour works by deploying Envoy as a reverse proxy and load balancer. Contour supports dynamic configuration updates and multi-team Kubernetes clusters with the ability to limit the Namespaces that may configure virtual hosts and TLS credentials as well as provide advanced load balancing strategies.
“We believe CNCF can play a big role in shaping the future of ingress controllers, a critical part of any cloud native infrastructure,” said Michael Michael, Contour maintainer, and director of product management at VMware. “We are excited to have a vendor neutral home, encouraging more companies and contributors to join our community, contribute, and help us deliver on the vision of Contour.”
Contour has been adopted by a number of well-known organizations and enterprises in production, including Adobe, Kinvolk, Kintone, PhishLabs, and Replicated. Adobe has adopted Contour as its ingress controller for “Project Ethos”, a multi-tenant Kubernetes based platform.
Main Contour Features:
- Envoy Inside: Contour is built as the control plane for Envoy, the high performance L7 proxy and load balancer
- Flexible Architecture: Contour can be deployed as either a Kubernetes deployment or daemonset
- Multi-team support: Safely support ingress in multi-team Kubernetes clusters
- TLS Certificate Delegation: Administrators can delegate wildcard certificate access more securely
Notable Milestones:
- 329 Contributors
- 91 Committers
- 2.3k GitHub Stars
- 375 Forks
- 48 Releases
“Modern distributed systems rely on networking and connectivity, making ingress controllers for Kubernetes an essential piece of architecture,” said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. “Contour is a logical complement to Envoy and makes it easier to consume in a cloud native, multi-team environment. As Envoy is an incredibly popular graduated project, we look forward to seeing what Contour will accomplish as part of CNCF.”
Contour has an active roadmap and plans to add support for Kubernetes Service APIs and for routing services across Kubernetes clusters. The team also plans to enable support for Envoy features like rate limiting, auth, and access log service.
In 2017 Contour was created at Heptio, which was then acquired by VMware in 2018. The team released v1.0 in November 2019.
As a CNCF hosted project, joining incubating technologies like OpenTracing, gRPC, CNI, Notary, NATS, Linkerd, Rook, etcd, OPA, CRI-O, TiKV, CloudEvents, Falco, Argo, Dragonfly, and SPIFFE and SPIRE, Contour is part of a neutral foundation aligned with its technical interests, as well as the larger Linux Foundation, which provides governance, marketing support, and community outreach.
Every CNCF project has an associated maturity level: sandbox, incubating, or graduated. For more information on maturity requirements for each level, please visit the CNCF Graduation Criteria.
Learn more about Contour, visit projectcontour.io.