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»Waypoint Roadmap

Waypoint is a new project and we have a lot we want to achieve with it. This page will outline some of the ideas we have for future versions of Waypoint. This is not an exhaustive list nor is it a promise that these features will be built, but it gives a glimpse in the vision we have for this project.

For a finer-grained view into our roadmap and what is being worked on for a release, please refer to the GitHub Issue Tracker. This is a more manual approach to reading our roadmap and includes small details such as bug fixes, but is much more accurate to what we're working on.

»Server Production Readiness Improvements

The initial Waypoint releases have a minimal featureset around running the Waypoint server. We plan to improve the waypoint install and waypoint server run interfaces to support more options, such as custom TLS certs.

»Access Control

The initial Waypoint release has a minimal token system that is used as a blanket authorization mechanism. In the future we will add a more fine-grained access control mechanism to Waypoint.

One exception to this today are Entrypoint tokens. The Entrypoint uses a special fine-grained token that allows it to only access entrypoint-related functionality for the specific deployment it represents. This was built as a special security mechanism however and isn't generally available to limit access for other tokens.

»Service Brokering (Databases, Queues, etc.)

We plan on having some mechanism by which applications can request services such as databases, queues, and so on. These services must be satisfied by some external system such as Amazon RDS. Waypoint will be able to request the service, connect the configuration, and destroy it when its no longer in use.

A design goal of Waypoint is explicitly to not do automated infrastructure management, so this feature will still put the burden of managing these services onto the user. However, Waypoint can help orchestrate initializing them and configuring applications.

We will likely integrate with Terraform in some way.

»App Promotion

Waypoint initially has the workspaces feature for isolating different environments. This is a working but minimal feature targeted towards this use case.

We plan on building on this feature to enable workspaces that may target different infrastructures (such as a dev vs. production cluster) and we want to build features so applications can be easily "promoted" from one stage to another.

»Exec Improvements

We're really excited about waypoint exec but there are a lot of improvements we want to make here:

  • New deployment targeting. - We want exec to be able to spin up new exec-focused deployments so that your exec sessions aren't shared with deployments that might be receiving user traffic. Additionally, this will let us harden security by disabling exec in most deployments.

  • Better security, specifically around disabling. - We want exec to be safe. One mechanism towards that is having exec be disabled as often as possible but can still easily be used when needed. We think having exec disabled by default paired with the above deployment targeting feature makes this a reality.

  • Native exec. - If a platform provides a native exec feature, we want to provide that as an option to users. This is always likely to not be a default because we want the consistent option as the default.

»Remote Runners

We will enable the ability for operation execution (build, deploy, etc.) to happen remotely. The CLI can still kick off operations but operations will happen on a remote machine.

The foundation for this and initially implementations are actually already in the initial versions of Waypoint. But we didn't feel confident in the implementation yet and we didn't feel we completed the story here to properly document and advertise this functionality.

Remote runners will enable more advanced workflows and improve security since access credentials can be encapsulated onto remote machines. The runners are expected to be run by the individual (not a hosted service). Runners also better enable Slack and other integrations.

We will continue building on this and release this in the future.

»Slack

We want to enable a "ChatOps" style interface to Waypoint. We spiked an experiment where we got this working and it is committed to the source currently under the x/ directory (for "experimental").

In the end, we felt this experience wasn't quite ready for the initial Waypoint release but we will enable this workflow.