Announcing GA for Gloo Edge 1.8 and Gloo Portal 1.0

Today we are thrilled to be announcing general availability (GA) for both Gloo Edge 1.8 (our API gateway based on Envoy Proxy) and Gloo Portal 1.0 (a developer portal for API management with full feature developer portal to catalog and share APIs.) Note that Gloo Portal is not sold as a standalone product, it is bundled with Gloo Edge Enterprise. 

There are a number of exciting new features now available in Gloo Edge 1.8, including:

• Support for SOAP / XSLT – SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) is an XML messaging protocol. SOAP remains prevalent today for enterprise web services across a number of industries, including financial services and healthcare. Unfortunately, SOAP, and associated legacy middleware applications, hold back large scale modernization efforts because there isn’t a clear migration that enables incremental deprecation of SOAP web services over time while gradually adopting newer APIs such as REST, gRPC, and GraphQL. Until now, you had to rely on old API gateway technologies that were created before clouds became popular to get SOAP support. There simply was no modern, cloud native, support. We have added XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) 3.0 support, and you can use it to modernize SOAP/XML clients and endpoints without fully eliminating SOAP from your web service portfolio. Should it take years to fully decommission your SOAP web services, you can retain backward compatibility while adopting modern protocols and run them in parallel, all on Kubernetes. This gives you a more comprehensive path to modernize applications. Note that this feature is only available in Gloo Edge Enterprise, not the open source edition of Gloo Edge or basic open source Envoy Proxy.
• Helm usability improvements – You probably use Helm (a CNCF project) to define, install, and upgrade Kubernetes applications, and share software with others too! With Gloo Edge 1.8 we have made it easier for you to expose your own values in Helm. You can now easily define your applications and configuration without needing direct assistance from Solo.io. You can now also define node affinity in Helm for your applications, and set up the desired logic. For example, you might say a particular application should run on a Kubernetes pod with certain characteristics (available resources, process type, associated workloads, etc.) and also set tolerances for the pod to only accept applications if conditions are met.
• Improved Flagger in Envoy Proxy – Weaveworks introduced Flagger as a tool to manage CI/CD, especially traffic routing for A/B testing, blue/green mirroring, and safer “canary” test releases to improve reliability. Solo worked with Weaveworks to add Flagger to upstream open source Envoy Proxy, and of course, made it a more native part of Gloo Edge at the same time!
• Schema in Gloo Edge CRDs – Kubernetes uses custom resource definition APIs (CRDs) to allow more modular control over functions being installed. If a resource has been added with CRDs, you can then call it with kubectl. We have improved Gloo Edge to now enable the use of schemas to validate CRD functions and avoid unintentionally breaking anything. Note that with Kubernetes 1.22 and newer a schema is required for CRDs.
• Access log redaction for improved security – you probably capture and keep access logs for audits and forensics in the event of a security breach. Sometimes these access logs themselves may contain sensitive information, so Gloo Edge Enterprise now has the ability to redact certain fields while still providing a readable report of activity.
• See all enhancements and bug fixes with release notes and Changelogs in Gloo documentation – We’ve added the ability to not only see release notes but to actually pick the version of Gloo Edge you are currently running and the version you wish to migrate to and see a list of all the added enhancements, security fixes and bug fixes in our documentation. 

As they say, “but wait! That’s not all!” We have also addressed over 40 individual customer requests to improve functionality in their own production environments and rolled these enhancements into the main product and upstream Envoy Proxy where applicable.

Now that Gloo Portal 1.0 is GA, you can use it confidently along with your Gloo Edge deployments. Gloo Portal 1.0 has tighter Gloo Edge integration which allows you to use virtually every feature of Gloo Edge directly in Gloo Portal, making it a full feature API management solution. New features include:

• Showback, chargeback, and usage tracking of APIs – We now provide a way to track user API usage at an exact amount (way more accurate than monitoring) which you can pair with a billing solution (such as Stripe) to start building your own API business and monetization. This feature also brings a graph to show usage results over time.
• We have improved the self-service usability of Gloo Portal so your developers can more easily publish, share, and discover APIs in both the command line and graphical user interfaces.
• Full Gloo Edge integration brings the capacity to generate and fully configure virtual services and route tables in Gloo Edge via Gloo Portal, use existing Gloo Edge virtual services with Gloo Portal, and get support for all upstreams (AWS Lambda, Consul, etc.) as well as multiple API version support.

To get started with the new versions, you can request a free trial of Gloo Edge and Gloo Portal today here. To connect, join the #gloo-edge, #gloo-enterprise, and #gloo-portal channels in the Solo.io Slack.

To get all the details about these exciting new features, we invite you to join us on July 13th for the webinar What’s New in Gloo Edge 1.8 and Gloo Portal (now GA!)