With Helm Version 3 support and more!

During KubeCon North America 2019 in San Diego, we proudly announced the General Availability for Maesh. Since then, roughly three months have passed. During that time we’ve received feedback from you, the community, about use cases you’d like to adopt Maesh for, and we’ve addressed them with this release.

Helm Version 3 Support

As of November 2019, Helm 3 has been released to the public. Maesh's Helm chart is now Helm v3 compatible, to benefit from all the changes in the internal architecture of Helm v3. As the internal architecture of Helm 3 changed enormously, sadly the change causes breaks, so the current chart is not deployable anymore with Helm 2.

For more information about Helm 3, please check that link.

Application Namespace Support

One request we received was to install Maesh along with your other services in the same namespace, instead of having Maesh need to run in its own namespace. With that new release, we're now supporting that scenario. You can now easily install Maesh in the same namespace as your applications which allows for greater flexibility and easier management, especially in multi-tenant Kubernetes clusters. However, of course it's also still supported to install it in a separate namespace and share it between all your applications.

Performance Improvement

As our Maesh controllers job is to configure the underlying Traefik pods, it needs to make use of the Kubernetes API to get the current state and create a proper configuration. With that release, we reworked the internal architecture of the controller to make use of listers instead of plain API queries. As listers are making use of a local cache, this is a huge performance improvement. Lookups are now made to that cache in milliseconds compared to live HTTP calls, thus reducing the load on your Kubernetes API as well.

Improved metrics support

Version 1.1 brings support for two new metric backends. Starting now, InfluxDB and StatsD can be configured to receive metrics from Maesh. The possible configuration options are best visible in the Helm chart. https://github.com/containous/maesh/blob/v1.1/helm/chart/maesh/values.yaml

Traefik Upgrade to 2.1

Last but not least we also upgraded the underlying Traefik that Maesh uses to create the service mesh to the current version of 2.1 to stay up to date and benefits from the improvements that is bringing on its own. The full changelog for Traefik 2.1 can be read here https://containo.us/blog/traefik-2-1-in-the-wild/

What’s Next

Once again, we are thankful for the multitude of contributors that went straight ahead and added Maesh to their development clusters. You provided us with invaluable and early feedback and made this release possible.

But, it’s just the beginning! Keep telling us what you like, giving us thoughts and ideas, and keep (or start) contributing! Pull requests and Issues are the best way to support the product and make it your own.