The Emissary Ingress open source ingress controller and API gateway for Kubernetes has joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) at the incubation level this week.

If you are wondering why this Layer 7 load balancer you might not have yet heard of is skipping over the sandbox level at the CNCF, it might be because Emissary Ingress is actually another popular project with a new name. Formerly known as Ambassador and created by Datawire, Emissary Ingress is the open source core behind the Ambassador Edge Stack, and has taken on a new identity, explained Ambassador Labs founder and CEO Richard Li.

With its contribution to the CNCF, the project hands over intellectual property rights, including trademark. But “we just couldn’t give the CNCF full rights to our company name,” said Li, “and so we just agreed the simplest thing to do is just to rename it, and ’emissary’ is a different type of ‘ambassador.'”

According to a press statement, Emissary Ingress is in use by companies such as Ticketmaster, Chick-Fil-A, and AppDirect, with reports of use cases “as high as 500,000 requests per second and jumps from 5 million users to 15 million in less than 10 minutes.” Emissary Ingress has actually been around in some form since 2014. Li explains that it came about shortly after Envoy creator Matt Klein spoke about building the Envoy proxy, also a CNCF project, at an early Microservices Practitioner Summit.

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