DEVOPSdigest

Solo.io introduced Gloo Mesh Enterprise 2.0, the latest version of its Istio service mesh and control plane that simplifies the configuration and operation of service-to-service connectivity within distributed applications.

Gloo Mesh Enterprise 2.0’s major enhancements include multi-tenant workspaces, a new unified API for east-west and north-south traffic management, a new UI for observability, and improved VM support. The company also announced the beta release of GraphQL for Gloo Edge, which embeds a GraphQL server natively into Gloo Edge. Gloo Edge is an API gateway and ingress controller that enables federated GraphQL queries of APIs.

“Our customers are using Istio in some of the largest, most complex and most diverse implementation environments imaginable — many running on multiple platforms with thousands of APIs and hundreds of millions of requests per day,” said Idit Levine, founder and CEO, Solo.io. “In fact, it was feedback from hundreds of customer conversations that led to Gloo Mesh Enterprise 2.0’s new capabilities. The enhancements are a natural evolution of our APIs that continue to simplify the adoption, use, and management of Istio over single-cluster and multi-cluster environments.”

Solo.io announced the general availability of Gloo Mesh Enterprise, an enterprise-grade, Kubernetes-native solution for multi-cluster and multi-mesh service mesh management, last year. Since then, companies in virtually every industry have turned to Gloo Mesh Enterprise for the most secure, reliable, and comprehensive way to adopt and manage Istio service meshes — with dozens of major improvements over open source Istio.

Gloo Mesh Enterprise 2.0 ups the ante, delivering new enhancements for customers who are managing hundreds of Kubernetes clusters, up to 100 million transactions per day, thousands of internal APIs, as well as large and diverse development teams. Updated capabilities include:

- New multi-tenant workspaces allow organizations to easily define fine-grained access control and editing permissions based on roles for shared infrastructure, enabling teams to collaborate in large environments. Users can manage traffic, establish workspace dependencies, define cluster namespaces, and control destinations directly in the UI — and policies can be easily re-used and adapted using labels.

- A new, cohesive Gloo Mesh API for Istio management that enables developers to configure rules and policies for both north-south traffic and east-west traffic from a single, unified API. The new API also simplifies the process of expanding from a single cluster to dozens or hundreds of clusters.

- New Gloo Mesh UI for observability provides service topology graphs that highlight network traffic, latency, and speeds while automatically saving the new state when you move clusters or nodes. Users get better readability with clean icons, colors, and the size of lines. Plus, customers can view TCP metrics and time ranges at a glance and expand to full screen to see everything at once.

- Improved VM support that reduces the time and the amount of code required to add VMs to Istio service mesh environments; also supports all existing applications running in VM environments.

Solo.io also announced beta availability of GraphQL for Gloo Edge. Solo.io has embedded a GraphQL server natively into Gloo Edge, which enables federated GraphQL queries of customers’ APIs using their service mesh and API gateways with no additional GraphQL infrastructure required. GraphQL, an open-source data query language for APIs, has gained considerable popularity among enterprises seeking to simplify client-server interactions.

Since Solo.io announced GraphQL support for Gloo Mesh and Gloo Edge last year, developers will be able to efficiently query microservices applications while benefiting from the connectivity, security, and reliability provided by an Istio service mesh. GraphQL provides declarative data fetching, with a client specifying exactly what data it needs from an API and underlying services through a single endpoint and getting an automatically aggregated response from all relevant services/APIs.

GraphQL for Gloo Edge delivers the following capabilities:

- A GraphQL server, resolvers, a GraphQL schema generator, and schema stitching for GraphQL that are all driven by declarative configuration.

- The ability to store GraphQL schemas as code, observe usage, and publish information, as well as manage schema and server changes, saving time and toil.

- Integrated monitoring capability that provides access to key metrics for GraphQL requests, query execution, and upstream resolvers to monitor performance and debug issues. Users can export metrics with Prometheus and Grafana.

Solo.io recently introduced BumbleBee, a new eBPF (extended Berkeley Packet Filter) open-source project that simplifies the development, packaging, and sharing of eBPF tools. The response to the announcement has been overwhelming, with the project earning more than 750 GitHub stars in just a few weeks. Solo.io is now incorporating eBPF directly into Gloo Mesh Enterprise to complement Istio and further enhance performance.

The new eBPF-enabled Gloo Mesh Enterprise:

- Reduces network latency by shortening the path a packet must take to reach the application, resulting in greater traffic efficiency.

- Operates as a safe, scalable, and secure plugin to the Linux Kernel and will be easily enabled with a simple checkbox in the GUI.

- Includes a CNI extension and the ability to extend the CNI with network policy written in eBPF without requiring you to replace the existing CNI.

Solo.io is continuing its investment in eBPF and will incorporate more eBPF capabilities into Istio service mesh.