Voyager

Project Overview

Voyager is a production-grade HAProxy-based Ingress Controller for Kubernetes, providing advanced traffic routing, load balancing, and SSL/TLS termination capabilities for cloud-native applications.

Challenge

As Kubernetes adoption grew in enterprise environments, organizations needed a robust, feature-rich ingress solution that could handle complex traffic routing scenarios, provide enterprise-grade security, and integrate seamlessly with cloud load balancers. The default Kubernetes ingress controllers lacked advanced features required for production workloads.

Solution

Voyager was developed as a Kubernetes-native ingress controller leveraging HAProxy's proven performance and reliability. Key innovations included:

• Custom Resource Definition (CRD) Controller: Built a sophisticated Kubernetes controller to manage HAProxy configurations through CRDs
• Cloud Load Balancer Integration: Seamless integration with AWS ELB/ALB, GCP Load Balancer, Azure Load Balancer, and DigitalOcean
• Advanced Traffic Management: Support for weighted routing, canary deployments, blue-green deployments, and A/B testing
• SSL/TLS Automation: Automatic certificate management with Let's Encrypt integration
• TCP/UDP Load Balancing: Beyond HTTP/HTTPS, support for arbitrary TCP and UDP services
• Authentication & Authorization: Built-in support for basic auth, OAuth, and external authentication services

Technical Implementation

Voyager was architected as a cloud-native application with the following technical characteristics:

• Language: Go (Golang) for high performance and Kubernetes ecosystem compatibility
• Architecture: Kubernetes Operator pattern with custom controllers
• HAProxy Integration: Dynamic configuration generation and hot-reload without downtime
• Multi-Cloud Support: Cloud-agnostic design with provider-specific optimizations
• Observability: Prometheus metrics, structured logging, and health check endpoints
• High Availability: Support for multi-replica deployments with leader election

Impact & Results

Key Features Delivered

Technical Leadership

Dipta Das served as a lead developer on the Voyager project at AppsCode, contributing to:

• Core controller logic and Kubernetes CRD implementation
• HAProxy configuration generation and management
• Cloud provider integrations (AWS, GCP, Azure, DigitalOcean)
• Traffic routing algorithms and load balancing strategies
• Community engagement, documentation, and issue resolution