CloudEvents, Multi-Cloud, and the Gloo Between Them

We at Solo believe the future of serverless platforms will be to enable building serverless applications across cloud vendors. As highlighted in Kelsey Hightower’s keynote speech at this year’s KubeCon Europe, the cloud community is interested in leveraging the power of multiple vendors when building serverless applications.

This was precisely our vision when building Gloo, our cloud-native function gateway. Gloo was built to act as an out-of-the-box gateway for well-known serverless cloud providers (Google Functions, AWS Lambda, and Microsoft Azure Functions) as well as a long list of on-prem Kubernetes-native serverless solutions (OpenFaaS, Fission.io, and more).

The CloudEvents Specification published by the CNCF Serverless special interest group highlights the need for better tooling and developer experience in the growing serverless ecosystem. The need to abstract away the provider-specific details of serverless computing has never been greater.

Gloo takes serverless computing to the next level by providing function discovery, blue-green deployments, authentication, retries, per-function TLS termination with SNI support, along with the full suite of Envoy API management features to serverless functions.

Here is a short list of some of the unique advantages Gloo provides:

• Invocation for the largest number of Serverless Providers: Call Azure Functions, Google Functions, AWS Lambda, OpenFaaS, FissionIO, and ProjectFn through Gloo without exposing access keys or invocation APIs to clients
• Support for CloudEvents API: Full support for function invocation based on the CloudEvents Specification
• Function Discovery: automatically discover your available functions by connecting Gloo with your account
• Metrics, Monitoring & Tracing: Request tracing built on OpenTracing, HTTP metrics exported to Statsd & Prometheus, and health checks to ensure requests are always routed to healthy serverless endpoints
• Performance: Invoke serverless functions without buffering requests; persistent connection pools improve latency during request spikes
• Advanced routing features: Retries, circuit-breaking, rate limiting, traffic shifting, blue-green and canary deployments
• Transformation: Request and Response transformation
• Security: TLS termination (with support for multiple TLS certificates and SNI), client certificate verification, RBAC and request authorization
• Pub/Sub: Gloo publishes HTTP requests to NATS as messages for persistence and enabling cloud-agnosic pub/sub out-of-the-box
• Full compatibility with Microservice and Monolith applications: Gloo is not limited to use with Serverless functions; it is in fact our design goal to glue together these various architectures into a seamless user experience.

Gloo is the first production-ready, fully-featured API Gateway with native integration with serverless providers, bringing the power of Envoy both to microservices and serverless applications. We encourage you to follow our blogs and try Gloo for yourself today. It’s free and open-source. Happy Glooing!