Solo.io Unveils Gloo Mesh Enterprise 2.0

March 8, 2022

New Multi-Tenant Workspaces, Advanced Istio Management, Enhanced UI, and VM Support Among Enhancements Addressing Enterprise-Class Requirements

Application Networking Company Also Releases GraphQL for Gloo Edge Beta at Second Annual SoloCon Event

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — March 8, 2022 — Solo.io, the application networking company, today 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.”

Gloo Mesh Enterprise 2.0: New Workspaces, New API

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.

“As users of the Gloo Enterprise offering, we are looking forward to having the complexity of an Istio service mesh abstracted in one control plane combined with our current Gloo Edge gateway,” said Gert-Jan Groeninckx, Platform Engineer at Waylay. “Having Gloo Mesh added to the Enterprise offering, will make adoption of Istio and its advantages on multi-cluster routing, observability, and managing the whole system very interesting.”  

“One of the key challenges that we faced was when we were assessing service mesh providers and had relied upon support that simply never materialized,” said Tom Howard, cloud networking lead, Invitae. “We found what we were looking for with Solo and Gloo Mesh. The responsiveness of the support, the focus on building these partnerships with customers and clients —  we see it as an interactive partnership to move forward to enhance the platform. We are excited Solo.io is announcing Gloo Mesh Enterprise 2.0 to help us further simplify service mesh adoption.”

GraphQL for Gloo Edge — Beta Availability

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.

“Ory is an open source company building out a planet-scale network infrastructure focused on customer zero trust,” said Thomas Curran, co-founder, Ory. “We’re very interested in GraphQL due to our whole permissioning infrastructure, and we are excited Solo.io is adding GraphQL to Gloo to enable developers’ APIs as GraphQL queries.”

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.

“Solo.io’s GraphQL support for Gloo Edge looks like it will allow us to replace a lot of cumbersome resolver code with a simple configuration,” said Matt Jones, Sr. Director, Architecture, Fitch Group.

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.

New eBPF Acceleration to Boost Service Mesh Performance

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.

SoloCon: Happening Now!

Idit Levine made these product-related announcements at SoloCon, where she was joined by Solomon Hykes, founder and former chief architect/CTO of Docker, and Louis Ryan, principal engineer at Google, during the keynote sessions. SoloCon is Solo.io’s one-stop shop for participants to learn the latest about service mesh, eBPF, GraphQL, WebAssembly (Wasm), Envoy Proxy, Istio, and more. The event, which kicked off today and runs through March 10, features three topic tracks (“community and open source,” “service mesh and application networking,” and “API gateway and edge technologies”), 35+ sessions, lightning talks, hands-on workshops, and customer presentations from USAA, Ory, Constant Contact, T-Mobile, and others.

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About Solo.io

Solo.io, the application networking company, delivers API infrastructure from the edge to service mesh, helping enterprises adopt, secure, and operate innovative cloud native technologies. APIs drive microservices and cloud native technologies, forming the foundation for developers, partners, and customers to interact with application services quickly, effectively, and securely. Solo.io brings developer and operations tooling to manage and federate security and traffic control and tie together the integration points to enable and observe the application network. Founded in 2017 in Cambridge, MA, Solo.io is backed by Altimeter Capital, Redpoint Ventures, and True Ventures. For more information, visit https://www.solo.io/ or follow @soloio_inc.

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