Solo.io Intros Gloo Mesh Enterprise 2.0 – InApps 2022

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

Key enhancements in the new release include multitenant workspaces, a new unified API for east-west and north-south traffic management, a new UI for observability, and improved VM support.

In addition, the application networking company announced the beta release of GraphQL for Gloo Edge, which embeds a GraphQL server natively into Gloo Edge — Solo.io’s API gateway and ingress controller that enables federated GraphQL queries of APIs.

Solo.io made these announcements at its second annual SoloCon digital user conference this week.

“The enhancements are a natural evolution of our APIs that continue to simplify the adoption, use, and management of Istio over single-cluster and multicluster environments,” said Idit Levine, founder and CEO of Solo.io, in a statement, noting that Solo.io’s 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.

Customer-Driven Features

Levine added that the new capabilities in Gloo Mesh Enterprise 2.0 are largely customer-driven based on feedback from hundreds of customers that Solo.io keeps in touch with via Slack.

“We have all our customers basically on Slack, each of them has their own channel, and we have a very good relationship with them and are very responsive to them,” Levine told InApps. “However, there are hundreds of them. This is a different model than regular companies. This is like, really, really crazy scale.”

“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 at Invitae, in a statement. “We found what we were looking for with Solo.io 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.”

Introduced last year, Gloo Mesh Enterprise is an Istio-based Kubernetes-native solution for multicluster and multimesh service mesh management.

New features in 2.0 such as multitenant workspaces enable users to set 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 the policies can be re-used and adapted using labels.

Gloo Mesh Enterprise 2.0 also features a new Gloo Mesh API for Istio management 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. And the 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.

Moreover, the newly improved VM support reduces the time and the amount of code required to add VMs to Istio service mesh environments, the company said.

“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, a platform engineer at Waylay, in a statement. “Having Gloo Mesh added to the Enterprise offering will make adoption of Istio and its advantages on multicluster routing, observability, and managing the whole system very interesting.”

GraphQL for Gloo Edge

Meanwhile, 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 that is used to simplify client-server interactions.

“Basically, we teach Envoy to become a GraphQL server,” Levine said.

“Ory is an open source company building out a planet-scale network infrastructure focused on customer zero trust,” said Thomas Curran, co-founder of Ory, in a statement. “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.”

GraphQL provides declarative data fetching, with a client specifying what data it needs from an API and underlying services through a single endpoint.

GraphQL for Gloo Edge delivers:

• A GraphQL server, resolvers, a GraphQL schema generator, and schema stitching for GraphQL 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’s GraphQL support for Gloo Edge replaces cumbersome resolver code with a simple configuration,” said Matt Jones, senior director of architecture at the Fitch Group.

New eBPF Acceleration

Meanwhile, 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 company is now incorporating eBPF into Gloo Mesh Enterprise to complement Istio and further enhance performance.

“We’re leveraging eBPF to get better latency and throughput of the service mesh,” Levine said. “Basically what we’re doing is we’re using eBPF to shortcut the HTTP stack.”

The eBPF tooling includes a Container Network Interface (CNI) extension and the ability to extend the CNI with network policy written in eBPF without requiring users to replace the existing CNI, the company said.

New Hire

And in other related news from the SoloCon event, Solo.io announced the hiring of Brian Gracely as its new vice president of product strategy. Gracely comes to Solo.io from Red Hat, where he was senior director of product strategy overseeing the company’s open hybrid cloud offerings, including OpenShift. He brings more than 20 years of industry experience in areas including open source software, containers, Kubernetes, cloud computing, data center virtualization, serverless and more, the company said.

Featured image via Pixabay.