Solo.io is excited to announce the release of Gloo Edge 1.13, the only new API gateway platform to be included in the 2022 Gartner Full Lifecycle API Management MQ. This release incorporates feedback from our new and existing customers into a release that brings enhanced scalability and performance to the forefront.
As we continue to deliver the features that our customers demand, we have grown the Gloo Edge engineering team by over 80% this calendar year, strengthening our commitment to making the leading API gateway even better. And the future has even more in store, as the Gloo Edge product roadmap grows more exciting and robust as time goes on.
Gloo Edge 1.13
Since our last release, we have added more than 70 features and fixes to Gloo Edge. Here are just a few of those new improvements:
Scalability and performance enhancements
An API Gateway is a key component of next-generation cloud-native applications, and being front and center, reliability is key. Gloo Edge 1.13 includes backend performance enhancements that allow customers to enjoy new levels of performance and scalability.
One specific use case enabled the expansion of an environment to more than 3,000 services using 9,000 upstreams and 27,000 routes, providing a highly available and performant experience for end users. The same customer is also able to take advantage of the performance enhancements in Gloo Edge 1.13 to add new upstreams up to 80% faster, which allows them to respond quickly and confidently to always-changing customer demands.
OpenTelemetry support
Gloo Edge 1.13 has improved support for OpenCensus and OpenTelemetry extensions to tracing, providing valuable insights into environments across a diverse set of tracing backends.
Rate limit webhook validation
Admission control is an essential tool to protect your application services from bots, spammers, and malformed requests, and Gloo Edge’s built-in rate limiting is one way to wield that power. Enhancements in Gloo Edge 1.13 provide a built-in method to catch rate limiting configurations that are not valid before they cause errors.
RBAC in Gloo Portal
Developers leverage Gloo Portal to easily access an organization’s approved and published APIs for use in their applications. Operations and security teams enjoy the benefits of standardized and known secure methods of accessing infrastructure, and Gloo Edge 1.13 includes enhancements to Gloo Portal, introducing role-based access control (RBAC). RBAC grants finer grained control of who can access and modify API objects, providing another step toward comprehensive zero trust infrastructure.
High availability for Gloo Edge control plane
Automation has matured from an optional quality-of-life concept to a necessary component in a larger infrastructure lifecycle process. As such, ensuring the availability of the systems that manage these processes has become more business critical than ever. Gloo Edge 1.13 introduces high availability capabilities for its control plane, enabling multiple replicas for continuous operations and zero downtime upgrades.
Gloo Edge and Nomad scalability
Kubernetes has grown to become a de facto standard for cloud-based container orchestration, but it is not the only available option. Customers who prefer a different option (or to use multiple orchestration platforms) have spoken, and we have listened. Gloo Edge 1.13’s integration with HashiCorp Nomad now scales to thousands of services. This provides even more flexibility, more options, and more value for Gloo Edge users.
Scalability, performance, and zero trust enhancements all add up to a fantastic final release for 2022, with more exciting work planned for 2023. Speaking of which…
Sneak preview: Near-term roadmap
Official ARM image support
When it comes to containers, it used to be a strictly x86 world, and we all lived in it. But additional processor architectures have enabled innovation across operating systems and brought new hardware form factors to the enterprise. ARM image support for the management plane is planned for Gloo Edge 1.14.
Support for Kubernetes 1.25
Kubernetes 1.25 introduced enhancements to storage automation, IP address collision avoidance, ephemeral container support, and improved Microsoft Windows support, among other enhancements. Gloo Edge 1.14 will add support for these versions of Kubernetes so customers can enjoy the associated benefits.
2022 saw many exciting advancements in cloud native applications. It’s anyone’s guess what sort of new experiences and applications you will create in 2023, but Solo.io will be there to help your organization make the customer experience even more amazing.
Try Gloo Edge today!
Give Gloo Edge 1.13 a test drive today by requesting a free trial. If you would like to learn more about Gloo Edge or any of the products in the Gloo Platform, our documentation page has all the details. And if you still have questions (or just want to give us some feedback), we have a public Slack community available for anyone to join. We’d love to hear from you!
Happy New Year!
