DEVOPSdigest

Solo.io announced several industry product updates that will advance the enterprise adoption, application, and use of service mesh technologies.

The company unveiled Gloo Cloud - Istio Service Mesh as a Service that enables organizations to discover, connect, secure, observe, and federate their service traffic across clusters, data centers, and clouds.

The company also revealed that its Gloo Mesh offering now includes a single pane of glass view for multi-cluster observability, while Gloo Edge 2.0 now delivers the Istio-native, fully-featured API gateway.

Solo.io also announced full support for gRPC specifications. The announcements were made at SoloCon, the company’s interactive, community-driven conference.

“We continue to listen to our customers, and what they are asking for are features, tools, and offerings that help them unlock the value of cloud — minus the operational challenges and overhead,” said Idit Levine, Founder and CEO, Solo.io. “...These new offerings will further accelerate enterprises’ adoption and management of service mesh technologies, eliminating much of the ‘back-end’ infrastructure worry. We look forward to previewing these new offerings at SoloCon with several Solo.io customers, technical experts, and Istio leaders and we plan to continue the industry dialogue.”

Gloo Cloud connects microservices applications on any cloud, hybrid, or on-premises environment. Solo.io experts will provide complete lifecycle management of Istio, saving enterprises the install, upgrade, and operations tasks. Gloo Cloud eliminates these chores, so companies can focus on building their APIs and services. Also, Gloo Cloud supplies a single pane of glass for operating a service mesh across any infrastructure. The new service empowers enterprises to derive the full benefits of Istio, including global service load balancing, end-to-end zero-trust security, and federated traffic and access control. Gloo Cloud’s advanced features include complex rate limiting, usage plans, and billing use cases.

Solo.io’s multi-cluster, multi-mesh management product, Gloo Mesh, now contains holistic multi-cluster observability features. Historically, troubleshooting and debugging a distributed microservices application has been a challenge. However, Istio and its community provide tools for obtaining and presenting metrics and access logs for applications that run in a single cluster. While observability within a multi-cluster environment is ideal, this capability also means additional complexity due to a lack of synchronization between metrics on different clusters. Solo.io helps collect, synchronize, organize, and visualize access logs and metrics from the entire application — and presents them to the management plane as a single pane of glass. This includes tracing transactions within the application that run across different clusters.

Also, Gloo Mesh now solves key traffic routing issues with Gloo Mesh Virtual Destinations. Gloo Mesh Virtual Destinations maximizes persistence and minimizes latency by automatically routing traffic to the nearest healthy service. Source traffic should be routed to the closest available destination, or routed to a failover destination if issues occur. Before, providing high availability of applications across clusters, zones, and regions was a significant challenge. Now, Gloo Mesh defines a virtual destination, which is a set of all possible traffic destinations. Gloo Mesh uses localization information and real-time detection of available and unresponsive services to route requests to the closest available destination.

Previously, while users of Istio’s built-in ingress enjoyed a unified control plane for all traffic into and within their cluster, they were confined by its limited features. Solo.io is addressing these limitations by adding the advanced features of Gloo Edge, the company’s next-generation API gateway built on top of Envoy Proxy, to Istio. Gloo Edge 2.0 now delivers unprecedented multi-cluster support by acting as a single virtual gateway spanning multiple clusters.

Gloo Edge 2.0, the newest version of Solo.io’s Gloo Edge, encompasses advanced security and policy features including WAF, DLP, response and request transformation, advanced rate limiting, out-of-the-box pluggable external authentication (OIDC, OPA, active directory, or whatever is already available in the environment), support for Wasm modules, and more.

Solo.io Gloo Portal now contains full support for gRPC specifications. The seamless integration of gRPC into Gloo Portal provides developers with unified access to all APIs, regardless of their specifications. Gloo Portal facilitates developer on-boarding, allowing them to more easily consume APIs. The offering also provides out-of-the-box OpenAPI/Swagger specs support.

Gloo Cloud, Gloo Mesh enhancements, and Gloo Edge 2.0 will be available in beta during Q2 2021.