Traefik's 10-Year Journey from Zero to Standard

Summary

10 years ago on September 22nd, 2015, after months of research and hacking, I posted a link on Hacker News about this small project I'd been working on called Traefik. Honestly, I was just hoping a few fellow developers might find it useful for their own container routing headaches.Well, things escalated quickly…Early Days: The Microservices Wild WestLet's be honest—2015 was a bit of a mess for anyone trying to manage microservices. Docker containers were getting some hype, Kubernetes was still this intimidating thing that required a PhD to set up, and everyone was manually editing NGINX configs like it was 2005.The problem was simple: traditional load balancers didn't understand the dynamic infrastructure of modern platforms. Your services were constantly coming and going, scaling up and down, and your poor reverse proxy was sitting there completely oblivious to what was happening behind it.My idea was equally simple: what if the reverse proxy could just... figure it out automatically? What if it could watch your containers, understand your services, and configure itself? Or to put it differently, what if we could delegate the routing configuration to the application level. In a world where there are now hundreds or thousands of services, each should come with its own ingress properties attached to it.The response surprised me, to put it mildly. Within a week of the public announcement, Traefik was in the top trending projects on GitHub, and I found myself frantically responding to issues and pull requests from developers around the world.Looking back, I have to admit I had no idea this would become what it is today. I set out to solve a real life problem I was experiencing, maybe thinking that a few other microservice nerds might be facing the same issue. The idea that Traefik would eventually become such a critical piece of today’s platforms? That seemed pretty unlikely at the time.But here we are, 10 years later, with some numbers that still make me do a double-...