Telepresence for Teams
Collaborative development and testing of Kubernetes services
Adopting Kubernetes was supposed to enable your team to ship features faster, so why is it slowing you down? We’ve figured out why - it's because the dev-test-build cycle on a containerized environment like Kubernetes isn’t as fast as it would be with a monolith or traditional computing environment.
To develop quickly, you and your teammates need to be able to run your application, no matter its size, in environments that give you fast feedback and the freedom to use your favorite local tools like debuggers and IDEs. This is where Telepresence comes in!
Telepresence provides a two-way proxy between your local machine and a remote Kubernetes cluster that enables you to interact with applications and services running in the cluster, fast.
Why is Telepresence beneficial for teams?
Easily review your code changes and that of your teammates
Telepresence can generate sharable preview URLs. This enables you to work on a copy of your service locally and share that environment with a teammate for review or pair programming. Preview URLs are protected behind authentication through Ambassador Cloud, and access to the URL is only available to users in your organization. You can make the URL publicly accessible for sharing with outside collaborators.
Easily bring your teammates onboard
We’ve made Telepresence easy for everyone to use, even your newest team members! With “Saved Intercepts”, your successful intercept connections can be shared with and used by your teammates. This means your teammates don’t have to be Kubernetes or Telepresence experts to start using and enjoying the benefits of intercepts.
Keep collaborating using the tools you love
Telepresence works with the tools you are already using; GitHub Actions, Docker Desktop, etc. We believe every development team should have a workflow where they can make changes to their Kubernetes service and instantly validate the impact of that change, so we made sure Telepresence could work with your team’s existing workflows.
More commits, less waiting
Traditionally, after making a code change, you’d need to build a container, push it, wait for it to upload, deploy the changes, verify them, view them, and repeat that process as you continually test your changes. Telepresence seamlessly and securely reroutes traffic from your remote cluster to your local services. Now you can code and test your local service in real time as if it was running remotely in the cloud. The faster you are, the faster your team gets to ship new features!
Test & debug K8s services without tripping over your teammates or impacting the production environment
With Telepresence, you’ll be able to share staging environments with your teammates without tripping over each other. This allows you to collaborate with a teammate to debug the service on the shared intercept URL without impacting the production environment.
Code and test at scale
Code and test your services locally against the services in the remote cluster as if it was also running on your machine, no matter its size or configuration.
Telepresence + Ambassador Cloud: The best onboarding experience for Kubernetes Teams
Do you have team members that should be using Telepresence but aren’t comfortable in the command line? Ambassador Cloud gives new users a setup wizard to simplify configuration and get them started creating intercepts in less than 5 minutes with just a few clicks. You can also share configuration via saved intercepts so they can use your same setup -- no room for error!
Step 1
Connect your computer to the remote Kubernetes cluster
This makes it possible for you to access the services in this remote Kubernetes cluster as if they were running locally on your computer and also reroute remote traffic to your local services. This way, if your application is too big or complex to run on your computer, you can still develop it locally.
Step 2
Re-route traffic by creating “intercepts.”
Create an “intercept” to reroute the traffic intended for the service in the remote Kubernetes cluster to the service running on your local machine with just a few clicks.
Step 3
Preview and share your changes before deploying
After every intercept, a secured URL is generated by Ambassador Cloud, showing the results of your local code running on an IDE. Any updates you make locally will instantly show up. This secured URL can also be shared with your teammates for collaborative development & debugging. Once you and the reviewer are satisfied, you can deploy your code changes.
Ambassador makes it very easy for us to manage endpoints across all our regions worldwide and is able to seamlessly adapt and work with every region’s 80 different endpoints, each with varying configuration requirements.
Nashon Steffen
Staff Infrastructure Development Engineer