What a trip the "Traefik Autumn Edition": true memories from a Traefik Ambassador
Tags: kubernetes, traefik, cncf, go
Published: 2020-12-23 13:39:33

It was April the 24th 2020, we were in the middle of the lockdown because of the global pandemic, among the tons of emails (most of them Adv) received everyday, there was one coming from Patricia Dugan from Traefik Labs, which says I was entitled as Traefik Ambassador.
What? Let me double check that this is not a spam email which will let me win a couple of iPhones after giving all my personal data and possibly my credit card number. No it's not, she really wanted to communicate that to me.

Wow, I am so proud, I am so happy! Yeeeaaah... But, wait a second, from great powers come great responsibilities. Which are my duties, what should I do? I have been a Traefik Ambassador since half an hour and I still don't know what should I do, that is a shame. Soon they will realize that I do not deserve to be a Traefik Ambassador, what a shame! I am so sad 🤕.
I was already seeing myself speaking at a conference, presented as a Traefik Ambassador. This would never happen, moreover conferences are not feasible too, because of this damned Covid-19. I remember when we used to meet at the CNCF Meetup here in Torino (🇮🇹), with Gianluca, Barbara, Giuseppe and all the others, and after listening to great talks we just used to have friendly chat in front of 🍺 and 🍕. Oh, beloved old days, will these ever happen again? When will we be able to organize a meeting in person again? Oh, but wait a second, let me remove the "in person" part… Organizing meeting 🤔, Traefik Ambassador... mmm, maybe I'm still on track. If I ask both Gianluca and Patricia to join forces to organize something together, I can still deserve my Traefik Ambassador entitlement.

Whether the previous lines happened in my mind in a couple of hours after receiving the news of me becoming a Traefik Ambassador, I can assure that what happened next took more or less a couple days.
I went through proposing that to Gianluca and Patricia, surprisingly they were both very positive about the proposal, so that with < 20 emails we were done in setting up not only a single event but a complete season of events. Thanks to Gianluca we found immediately a nicename: "Traefik Autumn Edition". The rest went so smoothly that I can barely remember anything stopping our flow 💪🏽.

The drawback was that eventually I was in charge for the very first event! 😱

## Episodes 01: Introducing Traefik Proxy 2.3. A Journey into Traefik Plugins via Gitops [29/10/2020]

And here we go: first event.

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">I&#39;m so glad we bring back the <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/CNCF?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#CNCF</a> Turin meetup with an Awesome series about <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Traefik?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#Traefik</a>. I am kicking off my adventure as <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/traefikambassador?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#traefikambassador</a>. Thx to <a href="https://twitter.com/traefik?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@traefik</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/cncf?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@CNCF</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/patricia_dugan?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@patricia_dugan</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/GianArb?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@GianArb</a> for making it possible and letting the <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Traefik?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#Traefik</a> community growing in 🇮🇹. <br>Stay Tuned!📣 <a href="https://t.co/PNlhsIk0Ye">https://t.co/PNlhsIk0Ye</a></p>&mdash; Sergio Matone (@sw360cab) <a href="https://twitter.com/sw360cab/status/1313215872656379905?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 5, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script> 

Although very excited, I succeeded in introducing the Traefik Labs Stack. I then explored Traefik Proxy and what is new in version 2.3. Finally I went through an overview of Traefik Plugins. The whole event was topped with extended demos and live coding. I showed basic usage of Traefik Proxy in Kubernetes environment, going through the definition of a Traefik Plugins (I made my own for the event). 

Demo gods assisted me almost till the end when I tried reflecting edits in code leveraging GitOperations, when the demo using ArgoCD did not work... But I can prove it works with a video!
{% youtube VgHrK5xIPT8 %} 

and here are the slides:
https://speakerdeck.com/sw360cab/traefik-autumn-edition-2020-s01e01

and the Traefik plugin code:
https://github.com/sw360cab/cncftaeplugin

Full video of the Event is here:
{% youtube AISnDSgcHoA %}

## Episodes 02:  Kubernetes Ingress Today and Tomorrow [19/11/2020]

Second event was immediately on his way:

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Couple weeks ago Episode 01 of <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Traefik?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#Traefik</a> Autumn Edition 🍂<br>was on the edge! Now it&#39;s time to look forward for Episodes 02,🗓 19th Nov fo: <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Kubernetes?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#Kubernetes</a> Ingress Today and Tomorrow. Presented by Kevin Crawley (<a href="https://twitter.com/notsureifkevin?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@notsureifkevin</a>) at <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/CNCF?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#CNCF</a> Turin. Join us: <br>👉 <a href="https://t.co/zT2zz8GqFH">https://t.co/zT2zz8GqFH</a> <a href="https://t.co/3SQGpDAyC2">https://t.co/3SQGpDAyC2</a></p>&mdash; Sergio Matone (@sw360cab) <a href="https://twitter.com/sw360cab/status/1327290935017926658?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 13, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script> 

Kevin Crawley aka [@notsureifkevin](https://twitter.com/notsureifkevin) (yes I am sure it was him!), from Traefik Labs,  drove us through the new possibilities given by release 1.18 of Kubernetes. He highlighted many notable changes including adding the new IngressClass resource and modifications made to the Ingress resource. It introduces a new field that specifies how Ingress paths should match and support wildcard domains. Kevin had a great demo using Traefik Proxy, MetalLB, and Kind.
We then had a great excursus of the new Service API specification in Kubernetes. This new API aims to bring vendor neutrality to the Ingress networking landscape. Kevin demonstrated how these recent changes operate using Traefik Proxy.

We finally had a great networking time where we were able to discuss how hard it is to achieve working configurations in Kubernetes when dealing with real world scenarios, even some shortcomings in Traefik Proxy that they are willing to improve soon.

Here are the slides: 
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1-YpI9StVmaRgIkTq-0Hy0CdfX8OlOcv5xFJoeyevVRU/edit#slide=id.g9e184c83e8_0_5

Full video of the Event is here:
{% youtube 2fJrEbSq4c8 %}

## Episodes 03: How to monitor Traefik workloads with Prometheus & Grafana [17/12/2020]

In an heartbeat we were at the Final Episode:

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">I still need to recover from last Episode at <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/CNCF?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#CNCF</a> Turin that was stunning! Now I need to pull myself together for the Great season Finale of <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Traefik?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#Traefik</a> Autumn Edition, which will be held by <a href="https://twitter.com/idomyowntricks?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@idomyowntricks</a>. Sign up ASAP 👇<a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/traefikambassador?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#traefikambassador</a> <a href="https://t.co/XmfH8hRI3K">https://t.co/XmfH8hRI3K</a></p>&mdash; Sergio Matone (@sw360cab) <a href="https://twitter.com/sw360cab/status/1331183641997750273?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 24, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script> 

Brian Christner ([@idomyowntricks](https://twitter.com/idomyowntricks)) from theByte showed the usage of Prometheus and Grafana leveraging native support in Traefik Proxy. He spent a lot of time showing code and GUIs instead of sticking with tons of slides. He answered a lot of doubts, gave advices and took us real-world scenarios 

Besides Docker Captain, Traefik Ambassador and Cloud expert, Brian is hosting online courses. Luckily he gave me a preview of the complete Traefik Proxy course, so I take the chance to suggest everybody taking it. [Check this out](https://www.thebyte.io/traefik-training)

Slides of the Event:
https://56k-share.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/Traefik_Observability.pdf

Full video of the Event is here:
{% youtube kNSm0JyFfyU %}

## Last Words

It has been a real adventure to organize, present and join the first Traefik Autumn Edition. It would not have been possible without the help of Gianluca Arbezzano ([@gianarb](https://twitter.com/GianArb)) who hosted the whole Season at the [Turin CNCF Meetup](https://www.meetup.com/CNCF-Italy/) and Patricia Dugan ([@patricia](https://twitter.com/patricia_dugan)) who is Head of Community at Traefik Labs and who never stopped encouraging and supporting me.
Especially in the period we are living, we started loving online events, streaming, webinars and so on. But actually we have enough of that and I thank all the people who joined and listened for us patiently.

A final thanks goes to [CNCF](https://www.cncf.io/) that allows the existence of its Meetup in my city, Torino (🇮🇹), [Equinix Metal](https://www.equinix.com/) that gave us bonus VPS for hosting our demos, and [Traefik Labs](https://traefik.io/) for supporting us and creating a great community around Traefik!

Stay safe, stay strong.