With Kubernetes came many new concepts, particularly around networking and traffic management. Alongside these new concepts were entirely new classes of tools, designed for ephemeral, containerized, and distributed application deployments. In particular, Ingress controllers and service meshes did not exist prior to the Kubernetes era. Nor were Layer 4 and Layer 7 protocols and traffic typically managed from the same control plane. At a granular level, Kubernetes introduces new complexities around security and management. Simple tasks like load balancing are very different in a realm where infrastructure is 100% ephemeral and often moving constantly — both in terms of setting up new instances with fresh IP addresses and geographically moving around the globe.
These new traffic management concepts and tools have the power to vastly improve developer experience and accelerate app development and delivery cycles through greater resilience, higher performance, and better secu …
