Aged to Perfection: Traefik's 10-Year Journey from Zero to Standard Author: Emile Vauge, Founder & CTO of Traefik Labs Date: September 22, 2025 --- Introduction Traefik started as a small project in 2015 to simplify container routing. Initially shared on Hacker News, quickly gained traction, leading to intense community engagement. Today, Traefik is a major open-source project critical to modern cloud-native infrastructure. --- Early Days: The Microservices Wild West 2015 was chaotic for microservices management: Docker gaining hype. Kubernetes difficult to install (complex, phased learning). Heavy reliance on static NGINX configs. Problem: Traditional load balancers couldn’t keep up with dynamic services. Reverse proxies unaware of live infrastructure changes. Traefik’s core idea: Automatic, automatic configuration by watching container environments. Routing delegated to the application level. Each service carries its ingress metadata. Result: Rapid community adoption. Traefik topped GitHub trending projects within a week. --- Milestones & Growth Highlights Traefik’s impact quantified with these metrics: 3.4 billion Docker Hub downloads. 56,000+ GitHub stars. 5,000+ merged PRs. Nearly 6,000 issues as a "persistent TODO". 900+ contributors globally. 500+ releases. 26 cheese-themed codenames. 16 maintainers. 1 company founded (Traefik Labs). --- The Maturing Process Traefik v1 Introduced: Automatic service discovery. Let's Encrypt integration for HTTPS. Support for Docker, Kubernetes, Marathon. Live config reloading. Traefik v2 Fundamental redesign: Routers, middlewares, and services abstractions. Support for TCP and UDP traffic. Kubernetes CRDs integration. Middleware chaining. Migration from v1 was challenging but insightful. Traefik v3 Focused on: Gateway API support (Kubernetes ingress future). OpenTelemetry integration. Smoother migration processes. Mirrored cloud-native evolution: From experimental to productivity focus. Reliability, security, scalability. --- What's Next for Traefik v3.5 - NGINX Compatibility Layer Addressing the end of ingress-nginx’s active development. Introduced a new NGINX provider that supports NGINX Ingress annotations. Allows seamless migration from ingress-nginx to Traefik with no manifest rewrites. Maintains existing workflows and annotations. Open for community contributions to improve compatibility. v3.6 - More Power, More Features Introduction of multi-layer routing: Routers can forward requests to other routers. Enables complex routing trees (e.g., layers for auth, then user-role routing). KNative integration: Traefik becomes a first-class ingress for serverless Kubernetes. Supports traditional services and serverless functions seamlessly. v4 - Perfectly Aged Release New features will be released in v3 minor versions first for early adoption. Gradual deprecation of legacy features ahead of v4. v4 will be a cleaned-up version of latest v3.x without deprecated features. Aim is smoother, incremental upgrades rather than big breaking changes. --- Open Source Community Impact Majority of contributions come from outside the core team. Contributions span: Bug fixes, new providers (e.g., KNative). Plugins (e.g., Sablier). Documentation improvements. Bug reports and feature requests. Diverse, global collaboration improving Traefik well beyond its initial scope. --- Anniversary Contest Next 50 contributors who have a pull request merged receive a limited-edition 10th Anniversary Traefik t-shirt. Shirt features all 26 cheese codenames from past releases. Designed by Pierre Keersbulik, a long-time Traefik designer. Contributions can be code, docs, plugins, or simple fixes. --- ##