Announcing Gloo Platform

Today is an exciting day for Solo.io and our customers – the launch and General Availability of Gloo Platform! This has been the culmination of 18 months of both internal engineering innovation and external collaboration with our customers.

Gloo Platform is the Service Mesh and API Platform for Kubernetes, Zero-Trust and Microservices.

Gloo Platform brings together the best of our products – based on Istio, Envoy and Cilium – into an integrated platform that automates deployments, simplifies operations, and extends Enterprise capabilities such as zero-trust security, multi-tenancy, advanced routing and observability to the entire Layer 3 through Layer 7 stack. Gloo Platform brings together:

• Gloo Gateway: Scalable, extensible cloud-native API Gateway management
• Gloo Mesh: Standards-based, scalable, secure Istio service mesh
• Gloo Network: Powerful Cilium CNI pluggability for Kubernetes networking

When we started Solo.io in 2017, the industry was just beginning to understand the power that Kubernetes brought to application deployments. But it was also a confusing time, as the market had not yet consolidated around many of today’s standards, or ways to operationalize this new journey to cloud-native. Over the last few years, companies have begun to understand the power of Kubernetes, which has not only brought significant improvements to how they build and deploy applications, but also introduced a number of new challenges. We call this time from 2015 to now, Cloud-Native 1.0.

The New Challenges of Cloud-Native

As with any technology journey, success will bring new challenges. For companies deploying Kubernetes and microservices applications, the challenges were typically around scalability, security and observability. But they have often been about manageability and trying to enable consistency across their technology stack. We call these new challenges Cloud-Native 2.0.

Gloo Platform has been designed to address the Cloud-Native 2.0 challenges. From working with companies around the world, in nearly every industry, we’ve learned that the next step in their cloud-native journey is not always the same. Sometimes it aligns to their “outside” needs – scalable API management, integration with public cloud services, advanced authentication and authorization policies. Other times it aligns to their “inside” needs – securing and observing microservices, scaling the number of clusters, or managing multi-cluster routing. Gloo Platform is designed to allow companies to begin with either their inside or outside challenges, aligning with the right Gloo technologies now, and being able to easily add incremental Gloo technologies at a later time, with just a license key.

Gloo Platform – Unified Application Networking Architecture

As Kubernetes deployments have matured, the technologies and operational models around them have evolved and matured. In particular, we’ve seen four key trends emerge:

1. Kubernetes deployments have matured in terms of automation. Kubernetes Custom Resources (CRs) and GitOps are becoming standard operational practices.
2. The intersection of the DevOps, DevSecOps and SRE roles around Platform Engineering teams and Cloud Platform groups.
3. Istio continues to be the industry’s leading service mesh for Kubernetes environments, which will only accelerate with its inclusion in the CNCF. And with the recent announcement of Istio Ambient Mesh, we’ll continue to see Istio evolve to enable greater simplification and ease-of-use.
4. While companies may treat their challenges as “inside” or “outside”, the underlying technologies between API Gateway and service mesh continue to merge together, facilitating the need for more consistent technology sage throughout the stack.

Architecturally, Gloo Platform enables a new set of capabilities that were never available in standalone products.

• A unified operational model, using Kubernetes CRs and GitOps, for all elements of the platform
• A unified control plane, based on Istio, to enable consistent deploys, scalability and security
• A unified API to manage both API-GW and Service Mesh functionality
• A modular architecture that allows companies to start with any component of Gloo Platform and easily be able to add other components without making changes to the existing environment – no re-installations, no new APIs, no new operational model.
• A set of consistent technologies across Layer 3 to Layer 7 to simplify operations and enable consistent deployments of policies and filters
• An extended support model that enables Enterprise support for much longer periods that standard open source projects

Gloo Platform brings together the industry’s leading Cloud-Native 2.0 technologies in an integrated way that nobody else in the industry can deliver. Early feedback from our beta customers has been outstanding, but we’d love to hear what you think. If you’re ready to take the next steps in our Cloud-Native Journey, please reach out to set up a meeting or a demo. Or if you’ll be attending KubeCon in Detroit (or virtually), we’d love to meet with you next week. 

Learn more about Gloo Platform.

• Watch the Gloo Platform and Gloo Mesh 2.1 demo video
• Check out the Gloo Platform Datasheet
• Learn more about Gloo Gateway
• Learn more about Gloo Mesh
• Learn more about Gloo Network