Solo.io Unveils Enhanced, Istio-Based Gloo Mesh Enterprise

New Enterprise-Class, Istio-Based API Gateway to Manage North/South Traffic Management

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.— Aug. 24, 2021 — Solo.io, the modern service connectivity company, today announced expanded capabilities for its Gloo Mesh platform, Gloo Mesh Enterprise. These capabilities deliver both service mesh management and a full-featured API gateway built on or for Istio environments — all customizable for any requirements. Gloo Mesh Enterprise now also includes Gloo Mesh Gateway, a full-featured API gateway along with multi-cluster aware Gloo Portal. The enhanced Gloo Mesh Enterprise unifies and simplifies the process of setting up and managing multi-cluster and multi-mesh service mesh environments, sparing companies the pain of building or operating multiple tools themselves.

“While Istio provides a basic API gateway, many organizations have told us they need a more advanced solution that includes advanced security and traffic management as well as a developer portal to improve communication between teams,” said Idit Levine, founder and CEO, Solo.io. “We’ve addressed customer demand for more flexible and less centralized gateway features with an Istio-based platform for both service mesh and API gateway. Solo.io is delivering a more comprehensive option that allows companies to more efficiently drive the right outcomes with reduced overhead, fewer resources to manage, and less complexity.”

Solo.io recently 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-featured developer portal for API management to catalog and share APIs. Gloo Mesh Enterprise encompasses key features of both Gloo Edge and Gloo Portal, with multiple versions available now on a single platform with unified SKUs and common management. Gloo Portal is now also fully integrated with Gloo Mesh Enterprise, offering the industry’s only multi-cluster, native developer portal for Istio. Customers can select from the following offerings to meet various requirements for their particular environments:

• Gloo Mesh Gateway — Full-featured API gateway built on Istio that offers all the capabilities of Gloo Edge such as DLP, north-south rate limiting, WebAssembly (Wasm), and SOAP/XSLT for Istio.
• Gloo Mesh Core — Service mesh management, multi-cluster and multi-mesh management that builds on Istio and WebAssembly and helps with FIPS-compliant operations across multiple clusters and other service meshes on any cloud.

“Customers told us that they needed a more unified approach for customizing, managing, and configuring end-to-end security encryption and traffic control, including integrating north/south traffic management within clusters,” said Christian Posta, global field CTO, Solo.io. “To meet this need, we have taken our customer-proven API gateway features from Gloo Edge and brought them to Gloo Mesh. Companies that have implemented Istio to act as an API gateway can now use Gloo Mesh to add a host of enterprise class features including external authentication, advanced rate limiting, and a multi-cluster developer portal.”

Gloo Mesh Enterprise now provides upstream open source Istio as a service mesh, an enhanced control plane for defining, enforcing, and observing behavior, as well as the following features:

• Observability improvements that allow customers to more readily monitor, troubleshoot, and track behaviors over time.
• Improved security certificate management such as integration with external certificate providers as well as automated control-plane certificate rotation with no downtime that enable customers to integrate with their PKI infrastructure and keep their signing certificates safe.
• Added N-4 version support for Istio (currently 1.11 and the four previous versions) for Istio with rapid response on important bugs and issues.
• Discovery of multiple available ingress gateways for each managed service mesh, plus the VirtualMesh abstraction now allow users to select specific ingress gateway(s) for handling their cross-cluster east-west traffic.

“While Istio provides enterprises with an API gateway today, there are limits when we look toward the future — and these limits will be a headache with configuration-related challenges for various use cases,” said Paul Nashawaty, senior analyst, ESG. “Today’s enterprises are requesting support for multi-cluster, robust, dynamic scenarios as well as advanced features for external authentication and rate limiting. Solo.io’s Gloo Mesh Enterprise addresses these potential pain points with a unified solution that has an eye toward the future.”

“As users of the Gloo Edge 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, DevOps team lead 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 very interesting.”

Additional Details and Availability

Gloo Mesh Gateway now offers almost all capabilities available in Gloo Edge. Gloo Edge is still available for customers who only need Envoy Proxy to act as an API gateway or point of ingress to Kubernetes clusters. For more technical details, please read our blog.

Resources

• Solo.io Website
• Solo.io on Twitter
• Solo.io on LinkedIn

Media Contact

Danielle Salvato-Earl
Offleash PR for Solo.io
solo@offleashpr.com