Traefik Cloud Native Proxy

Traefik is an open source cloud-native application proxy and ingress controller that automatically discovers services and dynamically configures routing without manual restarts. Written in Go by Traefik Labs, it has become one of the most popular reverse proxies for containerized and Kubernetes-native environments, with the current stable release at version 3.7. The core architecture uses a provider system that watches infrastructure state across multiple backends including Kubernetes via Gateway API, CRD, and Ingress resources, Docker and Docker Swarm through container labels, HashiCorp Consul and Nomad service catalogs, Amazon ECS tasks, and key-value stores like Redis, etcd, and ZooKeeper. When services are added, removed, or scaled, the proxy detects the change and updates its routing table in real time without dropping active connections. The entrypoint system manages TCP and UDP listeners with per-port TLS configuration, while the router and service abstractions define traffic routing rules using a composable rule syntax matching on host, path, headers, query parameters, and client IP. Over 50 middleware types process requests in a configurable pipeline chain, including authentication via basic auth and forward auth, rate limiting, circuit breaking, request rewriting, compression, CORS, security headers, IP allow lists, redirect rules, retry logic, and response buffering. Automatic HTTPS is provided through ACME certificate resolvers with support for Let Encrypt and other ACME-compatible authorities, including HTTP-01, TLS-ALPN-01, and DNS-01 challenge types with wildcard certificate support. Observability features include structured logging, Prometheus metrics, OpenTelemetry distributed tracing, and a web dashboard for inspecting the current routing configuration. The commercial Traefik Hub product extends the proxy with API gateway capabilities including JWT and OIDC authentication, Web Application Firewall, distributed rate limiting, and API key management.