Træfik | Traefik

Træfik (pronounced like traffic) is a modern HTTP reverse proxy and load balancer made to deploy microservices with ease. It supports several backends (Docker, Swarm, Mesos/Marathon, Consul, Etcd, Zookeeper, BoltDB, Amazon ECS, Amazon DynamoDB, Rest API, file...) to manage its configuration automatically and dynamically.

Overview

Imagine that you have deployed a bunch of microservices on your infrastructure. You probably used a service registry (like etcd or consul) and/or an orchestrator (swarm, Mesos/Marathon) to manage all these services. If you want your users to access some of your microservices from the Internet, you will have to use a reverse proxy and configure it using virtual hosts or prefix paths:

domain api.domain.com will point the microservice api in your private network
path domain.com/web will point the microservice web in your private network
domain backoffice.domain.com will point the microservices backoffice in your private network, load-balancing between your multiple instances

But a microservices architecture is dynamic... Services are added, removed, killed or upgraded often, eventually several times a day.

Traditional reverse-proxies are not natively dynamic. You can't change their configuration and hot-reload easily.

Here enters Træfik.

Architecture

Træfik can listen to your service registry/orchestrator API, and knows each time a microservice is added, removed, killed or upgraded, and can generate its configuration automatically. Routes to your services will be created instantly.

Run it and forget it!

Quickstart

You can have a quick look at Træfik in this Katacoda tutorial that shows how to load balance requests between multiple Docker containers.

Here is a talk given by Ed Robinson at the ContainerCamp UK conference. You will learn fundamental Træfik features and see some demos with Kubernetes.

Here is a talk (in French) given by Emile Vauge at the Devoxx France 2016 conference. You will learn fundamental Træfik features and see some demos with Docker, Mesos/Marathon and Let's Encrypt.

Get it

Binary

You can grab the latest binary from the releases page and just run it with the sample configuration file:

./traefik -c traefik.toml

Docker

Using the tiny Docker image:

docker run -d -p 8080:8080 -p 80:80 -v $PWD/traefik.toml:/etc/traefik/traefik.toml traefik

Test it

You can test Træfik easily using Docker compose, with this docker-compose.yml file in a folder named traefik:

version: '2'

services:
  proxy:
    image: traefik
    command: --web --docker --docker.domain=docker.localhost --logLevel=DEBUG
    networks:
      - webgateway
    ports:
      - "80:80"
      - "8080:8080"
    volumes:
      - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock
      - /dev/null:/traefik.toml

networks:
  webgateway:
    driver: bridge

Start it from within the traefik folder:

docker-compose up -d

In a browser you may open http://localhost:8080 to access Træfik's dashboard and observe the following magic.

Now, create a folder named test and create a docker-compose.yml in it with this content:

version: '2'

services:
  whoami:
    image: emilevauge/whoami
    networks:
      - web
    labels:
      - "traefik.backend=whoami"
      - "traefik.frontend.rule=Host:whoami.docker.localhost"

networks:
  web:
    external:
      name: traefik_webgateway

Then, start and scale it in the test folder:

docker-compose up -d
docker-compose scale whoami=2

Finally, test load-balancing between the two services test_whoami_1 and test_whoami_2:

$ curl -H Host:whoami.docker.localhost http://127.0.0.1
Hostname: ef194d07634a
IP: 127.0.0.1
IP: ::1
IP: 172.17.0.4
IP: fe80::42:acff:fe11:4
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: 172.17.0.4:80
User-Agent: curl/7.35.0
Accept: */*
Accept-Encoding: gzip
X-Forwarded-For: 172.17.0.1
X-Forwarded-Host: 172.17.0.4:80
X-Forwarded-Proto: http
X-Forwarded-Server: dbb60406010d

$ curl -H Host:whoami.docker.localhost http://127.0.0.1
Hostname: 6c3c5df0c79a
IP: 127.0.0.1
IP: ::1
IP: 172.17.0.3
IP: fe80::42:acff:fe11:3
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: 172.17.0.3:80
User-Agent: curl/7.35.0
Accept: */*
Accept-Encoding: gzip
X-Forwarded-For: 172.17.0.1
X-Forwarded-Host: 172.17.0.3:80
X-Forwarded-Proto: http
X-Forwarded-Server: dbb60406010d