DEVOPSdigest

Solo.io announced the general availability of the company’s API gateway based on Envoy Proxy, Gloo Edge 1.8, which is bundled with Gloo Portal 1.0, a full-feature developer portal for API management to catalog and share APIs.

Both products are an integral part of Solo.io’s comprehensive Gloo API Infrastructure Platform, which allows organizations to transform to a cloud-native application architecture by connecting application services, service meshes, clusters, and clouds.

“APIs are the building blocks for today’s modern applications, forming the foundation for developers, partners, and customers to quickly and securely interact with application services. Managing APIs effectively and efficiently is key, which is why we’ve focused on developing a full-feature API management system for enterprises,” said Idit Levine, CEO, Solo.io. “Our customers had been asking for a solution to SOAP, since they were forced to rely on old API gateway technologies in the absence of a clear migration path. Now our customers have modern, cloud native support.”

Gloo Edge 1.8 offers a number of new modern, cloud-native enhancements that will help enterprises facilitate and secure application traffic at the edge. These include:

- Support for SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol)/XSLT: Additional XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) 3.0 support that can be used to modernize SOAP/XML clients and endpoints without fully eliminating SOAP from the web service portfolio, providing a more comprehensive path to modernize applications.

- Helm usability improvements: New features make it easy for customers to define, set up, and configure their applications and expose their own values in Helm, a CNCF project that enables users to define, install, and upgrade Kubernetes applications, as well as share software with others.

- Improved Flagger in Envoy Proxy: The addition of Weaveworks’ Flagger as a native part of Gloo Edge for CI/CD management and traffic routing for A/B and canary testing.

- Schema in Gloo Edge custom resource definition APIs (CRDs): The enablement of the use of schemas to validate CRD functions, as a schema is required for CRDs with Kubernetes 1.22 and newer.

- Access log redaction for improved security: The ability to redact certain fields with sensitive information while still providing a readable report of activity.

- Release notes and changelogs in Gloo documentation: A closer view into all enhancements and bug fixes with release notes and changelogs in Gloo documentation, with the ability to pick the version of Gloo Edge you are currently running and the version you wish to migrate to and see a list of all added enhancements, security fixes, and bug fixes.

Solo.io also worked with Weaveworks to add Flagger to upstream open source Envoy Proxy, making it a more native component of Gloo Edge in the process.

"Over time, the integration between Flagger and Solo.io technologies kept improving and we’re now at a point where all the release strategies that Flagger knows about work seamlessly with Gloo Edge," said Stefan Prodan, Developer Experience Engineer, Weaveworks.

Meanwhile, the Gloo Portal 1.0 is now a GA feature that customers can use in tandem with their Gloo Edge deployments. New capabilities include:

- Showback, chargeback, usage tracking of APIs: The ability to track user API usage at an exact amount, which can be paired with a billing solution to enable monetization.

- Improved self-service usability: A more intuitive experience for developers to publish, share, and discover APIs in both the command line and graphical user interfaces.

- Full Gloo Edge integration: The capacity to generate and fully configure virtual services and route tables in Gloo Edge via Gloo Portal, use existing Gloo Edge virtual services with Gloo Portal, and get support for all upstreams (AWS Lambda, Consul, etc.) as well as multiple API version support.

“Gloo Portal’s integration with Gloo Edge delivers easy access to a full-feature API management solution,” said Christian Posta, Global Field CTO, Solo.io. “Plus, the new user API usage tracking feature provides customers with more accurate data than simple monitoring. The new Gloo Portal graph shows usage results over time, helping organizations build a stronger API business. Solo.io’s modern API infrastructure delivers the experience, features, and capabilities today’s enterprises need to derive the most value from their application investments.”