Introducing Gloo Mesh Enterprise and the Gloo API Infrastructure Platform

Three years ago we started Solo.io with the mission to help businesses transform to microservices architecture to gain the benefits of agility and speed in delivering new applications and functionality to automate their business and delight their customers. Our approach meets the organization where they are today and enables them to incrementally adopt at the pace of their business — to realize immediate value of the new innovation alongside their existing IT investments. As part of that journey, we recognized that every part of the application stack would be disrupted and new tools required as microservices architecture became more widely adopted — especially to address challenges of service communication.

We recognized this challenge and made service mesh a core part of our product strategy. As early fans we understood that we needed to balance our excitement with the realities of technology maturity and readiness of the enterprise community for service mesh. For those who have followed us over the years, that’s why positioned the products independently. This gave each audience the ability to understand and try the different tools that was relevant to their stage in the transformation journey without pushing emerging technologies they may not be ready for at that time.

Gloo API Infrastructure

Today, we are announcing the Gloo API Infrastructure Platform — a suite of products for developers and operators to enable, secure, and manage modern service connectivity from the edge to service mesh. In the past few years, we’ve not only a seen tremendous adoption of cloud and Kubernetes across all industries and company sizes and maturity in the service mesh ecosystem. Awareness (or hype) of service mesh is now at an all time high! The time felt right to bring together our previously distinct products into a unified message and integrated suite.

Gloo is the name of our first product, the Envoy Proxy based API Gateway, and it so perfectly described what it did — glue together diverse workloads (monoliths, microservices, serverless) on any infrastructure through their application APIs. As we looked across the rest of our portfolio, the ability to glue together heterogeneous workloads, environments, and people through the application network is at the core of all of our products. It made perfect sense to rebrand all of our products under the Gloo name.

The Gloo API Infrastructure Platform includes:

• Gloo Mesh (previously Service Mesh Hub), single and multi-cluster service mesh management plane along with production and long term support (LTS) for Istio
• Gloo Edge (previously Gloo), a next-generation API gateway and ingress controller built with Envoy Proxy
• Gloo Portal (previously Developer Portal), a developer portal to catalog and consume running application APIs
• Gloo Extensions (includes WebAssemblyHub), developer and operator tools to customize Envoy Proxy with WebAssembly modules

We are excited to keep “gloo-ing” with you and today we are also announcing the beta of Gloo Mesh Enterprise.

Introducing Gloo Mesh Enterprise

Gloo Mesh (previously Service Mesh Hub) is a unified management plane for single to multi-cluster to multi-platform service mesh environments. Launched in May 2019 and open sourced in the spring of this year, Gloo Mesh provides tooling for consistent configuration and operation of any number of service meshes. Since the initial launch, we’ve worked closely with our customers to integrate additional security and management functionality. These features assist in the adoption of service mesh at any scale on any cloud. Our vision of a multi-mesh future is to “gloo” together these heterogenous environments through a unified API and operational model.

Gloo Mesh Enterprise includes all the functionality of Gloo Mesh Open Source like multi-cluster configuration and management, global failover and locality aware routing, discovery, and health checks. Gloo Mesh Enterprise works with Istio, AWS App Mesh, and Microsoft Open Service Mesh. 

Additionally, Gloo Mesh Enterprise includes additional functionality for enterprise scale, security, and observability, including:

• A Role-Based API to delegate access and ownership by different personas to configure policies, allowing organizations to scale service mesh adoption across development, SRE, admins, and operations.
• Production Istio Support and long-term support of validated, upstream Istio software including maintenance, patches, and hotfixes for secure and reliable service mesh deployments. 
• Operational Observability with continuous discovery and health checks of service meshes, services, and configurations of registered clusters in a unified dashboard.
• Integrated WebAssembly to customize the behavior of the sidecar proxies with developer tools to build, share, and deploy Webassembly modules.

We invite you to register for the beta, and we are looking forward to working with you on your service mesh needs.  Visit us at the KubeCon Virtual conference next week to learn more about Gloo Mesh Enterprise!

Learn more

• Register for the Gloo Mesh Enterprise beta
• Read the blog post on Role-Based API for Multi-Cluster Service Mesh
• Sign up for a KubeCon demo
• Questions? Join the community