The second major release of cloud native edge router Traefik is now available to download, adding TCP support and other good stuff to the open source project.

Traefik is mainly developed by cloud native networking company Containous, whose CEO Emile Vauge defined the project’s mission in a canned statement as “building a single, complete solution that simplifies the networking complexity associated with designing, deploying, and managing applications”. Traefik also serves as the basis for Maesh, which, if you can’t tell by the name, is a service mesh brought to life by the same company.

One of the major additions version 2.0 got to see, was TCP support which comes with routing based on server name indication and multi-protocol ports. The latter lets users handle requests sent via different protocols through the same entry points.

If there is a need for more refined route customisation, Traefik 2.0 can make use of different middleware. These include helpers for security and authentication, as well as path and content modifiers, which can also be combined to get the most use out of them. 

A word of warning for those who want to look into the new middleware pieces: at the time of writing, the documentation doesn’t seem to be quite where it should be yet, so you might have to take to the community forum if you get stuck.

Requested features that also made it into the new version include canary deployments and A/B testing. Realised through service load balancers, they can help you make sure your new deployment won’t make matters worse. The implementation apparently is also the basis for the newly added mirroring services, which duplicate requests and sends them to different services, should the need arise.

To make configurations for Kubernetes users more clear, Traefik has been fitted with a new custom resource definition. A new WebUI gives users a better idea of the state of their clusters. Details and additional information can be found in the release notes. 

Since Traefik includes a number of breaking changes, users interested in updating might want to scroll through the migration guide first. Those working with container orchestrator Kubernetes meanwhile get some extra help in the form of a special tool to convert Ingress objects.