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Frequently Asked Questions

Telepresence, now in Blackbird FAQs

What's the difference between Telepresence and Telepresence OSS?

Telepresence is a widely adopted development tool for fast local development of Kubernetes applications. It is built on the CNCF Telepresence project, with extended features, including access to dashboards, auditing capability, increased security configuration for platform teams, and world-class product support from Ambassador’s Customer Support team.

What operating systems does Telepresence work on?

Telepresence currently works natively on macOS (Intel and Apple Silicon), Linux, and Windows.

What protocols can be intercepted by Telepresence?

All HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2 protocols can be intercepted. This includes: REST, JSON/XML over HTTP, gRPC, and GraphQL.

When using Telepresence to intercept a pod, are the Kubernetes cluster environment variables proxied to my local machine?

Yes, you can either set the pod’s environment variables on your machine or write the variables to a file to use with Docker or another build process. Please see the environment variable reference doc for more information.

When connected to a Kubernetes cluster via Telepresence, can I access cloud-based services and data stores via their DNS name?

You can connect to cloud-based data stores and services that are directly addressable within the cluster (e.g. when using an ExternalName Service type), such as AWS RDS, Google pub-sub, or Azure SQL Database.

What types of ingress does Telepresence support for the preview URL functionality?

The preview URL functionality should work with most ingress configurations, including straightforward load balancer setups.

Telepresence will discover/prompt during first use for this info and make its best guess at figuring this out and ask you to confirm or update this.

Why are my intercepts still reporting as active when they've been disconnected?

In certain cases, Telepresence might not have been able to communicate back with Ambassador Cloud to update the intercept's status. Worry not, they will get garbage collected after a period of time.

Why is my intercept associated with an "Unreported" cluster?

Intercepts tagged with "Unreported" clusters simply mean Ambassador Cloud was unable to associate a service instance with a known detailed service from an Edge Stack or API Gateway cluster. Connecting your cluster to the Service Catalog will properly match your services from multiple data sources.

Will Telepresence be able to intercept workloads running on a private cluster or cluster running within a virtual private cloud (VPC)?

Yes. The cluster has to have outbound access to the internet for the preview URLs to function correctly, but it doesn't need to have a publicly accessible IP address.

The cluster must also have access to an external registry in order to be able to download the traffic-manager and traffic-agent images that are deployed when connecting with Telepresence.

Why does running Telepresence require sudo access for the local daemon unless it runs in a Docker container?

The local daemon needs sudo to create a VIF (Virtual Network Interface) for outbound routing and DNS. Root access is needed to do that unless the daemon runs in a Docker container.

What components get installed in the cluster when running Telepresence?

A single traffic-manager service is deployed in the ambassador namespace within your cluster, and this manages resilient intercepts and connections between your local machine and the cluster.

When running in team mode, a single ambassador-agent service is deployed in the ambassador namespace. It communicates with the cloud to keep your list of services up to date.

A Traffic Agent container is injected per pod that is being intercepted. The first time a workload is intercepted all pods associated with this workload will be restarted with the Traffic Agent automatically injected.

How can I remove all the Telepresence components installed within my cluster?

You can run the command telepresence helm uninstall to remove everything from the cluster, including the traffic-manager and the ambassador-agent services, and all the traffic-agent containers injected into each pod being intercepted. Also run telepresence quit -s to stop the local daemon running.

What language is Telepresence written in?

All components of the Telepresence application and cluster components are written using Go.

How does Telepresence connect and tunnel into the Kubernetes cluster?

The connection between your laptop and cluster is established by using the kubectl port-forward machinery (though without actually spawning a separate program) to establish a TLS encrypted connection to Telepresence Traffic Manager in the cluster, and running Telepresence's custom VPN protocol over that connection.

What identity providers are supported for authenticating to view a preview URL?

GitHub, GitLab, Google, and Docker.

How are "Connect Sessions" calculated?

The connect sessions are counted when you can run the Telepresence connect command, or it will be done during an intercept, which automatically connects as part of the intercept process.

What plans are currently available for Telepresence?

We currently offer 3 plans for Telepresence, depending on your need and the size of your organization - Lite, Developer and Enterprise. Please see our pricing page for more details.

How do I get help for Telepresence?

If you need a guaranteed SLA, we also have commercial contracts. Contact sales for more information.

Edge Stack FAQs

What's the difference between Emissary-ingress and Ambassador Edge Stack?

Emissary-ingress and Ambassador Edge Stack are Kubernetes-native API Gateways that deliver scalability, security, and simplicity for some of the world's largest Kubernetes installations.

Emissary-ingress is a CNCF Incubating project and provides the open-source core of Ambassador Edge Stack.

Edge Stack is intended to provide all the functionality you need at the edge, including an API Gateway, ingress controller, load balancer, developer portal, and more. Go here to see full Edge Stack vs Emissary-Ingress feature comparison.

How does Edge Stack use Envoy Proxy?

Ambassador Edge Stack uses Envoy Proxy as its core proxy. Envoy is an open-source, high-performance proxy originally written by Lyft. Envoy is now part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

What is the performance of Edge Stack?

There are many dimensions to performance. We published a benchmark of Ambassador Edge Stack performance on Kubernetes. Our internal performance regressions cover many other scenarios; we expect to publish more data in the future.

How do I disable the 404 landing page?

How do I disable the default Admin mappings?

What's the difference between a service mesh (such as Istio) and Edge Stack?

Service meshes focus on routing internal traffic from service to service ("east-west"). Ambassador Edge Stack focuses on traffic into your cluster ("north-south"). While both a service mesh and Ambassador Edge Stack can route L7 traffic, the reality is that these use cases are quite different. Many users will integrate Ambassador Edge Stack with a service mesh. Production customers of Ambassador Edge Stack have integrated with Consul, Istio, and Linkerd2.

What kind of licenses are available for Edge Stack?

All Edge Stack licenses are based on Requests Per Second (RPS) through any auth filters or the rate limiter.

We offer two licenses for Edge Stack:

  • Community license that allows up to 5 RPS
  • Enterprise license for 6+ RPS using those features

See our pricing page for more details.

How do I get a license for Edge Stack?

Can I get a license without creating an Ambassador Cloud account?

We offer licenses for air-gapped environments where logging into Ambassador Cloud is not possible through our Enterprise license. Please contact sales for more information.

What kind of support or SLAs (Service Level Agreements) come with the Edge Stack Enterprise plan?

For our Edge Stack Enterprise plan, we offer standard 5x8 support, which means you can expect support during normal business hours, five days a week. If your organization requires more extensive support, there's an additional option to upgrade to 24/7 support to ensure that any issues are addressed promptly, regardless of the time of day or week.

For more information on support for enterprise, please contact sales.

How do I get help for Edge Stack?

If you need a guaranteed SLA, we also have commercial contracts. Contact sales for more information.