Traefik Labs Presents at Tech Field Day at KubeCon North America 2025

Run Your AI and APIs Anywhere with Traefik Labs

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Sudeep Goswami, CEO of Traefik Labs, began the presentation by introducing Traefik Labs and outlining three main topics. The first was the concept of unified application intelligence. Second, the acceleration of AI in the enterprise. Finally, running applications anywhere, emphasizing freedom of choice, including public cloud, edge environments, and air-gapped environments. All growing themes at KubeCon.

Traefik is one of the most downloaded API gateways, boasting over 3.4 billion downloads on Docker Hub. The open-source project, Traffic Proxy, boasts a vibrant community with over 800 contributors, and its latest version, V3.6, features numerous enhancements driven by the community. Traefik is known for its intuitive interface, ease of use, and powerful capabilities, with a fully declarative infrastructure-as-code deployment model. The primary users and advocates are DevOps engineers, platform teams, and SREs, with increasing adoption by security and AIOps teams due to the agility and user experience it provides for AI workloads.

The core of Traefik Labs’ portfolio is Traefik Hub, which offers an open-source ingress controller, a licensed API gateway, and API management. Differentiators include excellent documentation, being Kube-native, an intuitive UI, and a focus on day two operations. They are fully declarative, embracing the GitOps model and CI/CD pipelines, enabling effective change management. Traefik’s pricing model is cluster-based or instance-based, unlike competitors that charge based on request volume, providing more predictable budgeting. The licensing also provides a safe zone for bursting without penalizing for autoscaling.

Personnel: Sudeep Goswami

Accelerating AI In the Enterprise with Traefik Labs

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Sudeep Goswami from Traefik Labs presented at Tech Field Day at KubeCon North America 2025, focusing on accelerating AI in the enterprise using Traefik Labs’ runtime gateway. Given the rapid proliferation of AI models, decoupling applications from specific models becomes crucial to avoid constant refactoring. Traefik Labs advocates for decoupling at the gateway layer, providing operational freedom and leverage.

The gateway’s role extends beyond simple routing, encompassing critical functions like authentication, rate limiting, and implementing guardrails to ensure AI usage aligns with enterprise policies. These guardrails prevent misuse, such as finance agents answering legal questions. Caching at the gateway also optimizes token consumption. Sudeep emphasized that while such logic can be embedded in applications, production environments benefit from consolidating it at the gateway for scalability, performance, unified control, and observability.

The presentation introduced the concept of a “triple gate pattern” for agentic workflows involving interactions with LLMs, MCP resources, and backend APIs. This necessitates AI gateways, MCP gateways, and traditional API gateways, ideally within a single binary to simplify deployment and management. Decoupling the API runtime from the model runtime is crucial, acknowledging the rapid evolution of AI models. Sudeep emphasized that no single model will ultimately dominate.

Personnel: Sudeep Goswami

Run Traefik Anywhere with Traefik Labs

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Sudeep Goswami highlights Traefik’s ability to run in diverse environments, addressing the growing trend of multi-environment deployments. Traefik is not limited to Kubernetes, but can operate on Linux, within Docker containers, HashiCorp Nomad, and across any certified Kubernetes distribution. Sudeep demonstrated the ease of installation using a consistent Helm chart across different environments, including AKS, EKS, GKE, and OKE, emphasizing that the same command applies universally.

The demonstration also included deploying Traefik at the edge, highlighting its default ingress status in K3S and seamless integration with platforms such as DigitalOcean Kubernetes, Canonical MicroK8S, and Linode’s LKE, provided they are CNCF-compatible. Further, the ability to run Traefik offline in air-gapped mode was highlighted, requiring only a simple flag adjustment. This capability ensures complete isolation without telemetry or “call home” features, broadening Traefik’s applicability in highly secure environments.

In conclusion, the presentation highlighted three key takeaways: achieving operational leverage through unified application intelligence, gaining architectural control with decoupled AI runtime environments, and ensuring true deployment sovereignty by running Traefik anywhere. These points address the challenges posed by the coexistence of VMs, containers, and serverless architectures, advocating for a unified application routing layer that simplifies management and control across diverse environments. The ability to run Traefik anywhere is positioned as crucial for achieving true sovereignty, as it avoids vendor lock-in and allows organizations to move freely between different cloud providers and environments.

Personnel: Sudeep Goswami