From day one, our mission with Gloo Mesh has been to provide a service mesh command center that will give users indispensable features to manage a “glooed” together mix of environments, and today I am excited to announce that Gloo Mesh Enterprise is now available in Beta. We are asking the Gloo community and customers to request a trial, get started and provide feedback via Slack on this latest Gloo Mesh Enterprise Beta so that our teams can continue to improve the features for its upcoming general availability. In addition, Gloo Mesh Enterprise has released its accompanying long term support for Istio, Istio on ARM and FIPS compliant Istio in general availability today with a license. 

Originally launched in early 2019, Gloo Mesh (previously Service Mesh Hub) aims to provide organizations with a command center for all their service mesh needs, from a single cluster with Istio to stitching together and providing consistency for multiple clusters running different service meshes. 

Some of the exciting features you will find in the Enterprise Beta release includes:

• A Single Pane of Glass for Every Service Mesh On Every Cluster – Gloo Mesh helps users manage similar or mixed service meshes such as Istio and Open Service Mesh (originally from Microsoft) over multiple clusters.  
• Ability to Create a Virtual Mesh that Connects Multiple Clusters –  Join similar meshes, such as Istio, together in a virtual mesh that makes services discoverable and policies easy to manage anywhere, even across clusters. With Gloo Mesh Enterprise the promise of federated workloads is finally here! 
• Enhanced Security Across Your Mesh – Gloo Mesh includes end-to-end security across clusters and meshes and forms a virtual, zero trust, mesh. 
• WebAssembly Modules to Increase Engineer Productivity – Extend your service mesh control plane to allow developers to declaratively initialize, build, push, and deploy Wasm filters to Istio workloads over multiple clusters. 
• Easy User Management – No more wrangling of users with complex RBAC permissions across clusters and meshes. With Gloo Mesh Enterprise you can now define a single user policy for your service mesh or virtual mesh, and propagate that policy to all your environments. 
• Simplified Failover and Traffic Polices – Easy to define policies for service failover and traffic limits that are effortless to migrate throughout your service mesh environments. 

Istio Support Features:

• Long Term Enterprise Support for Istio – Gloo Mesh enterprise license includes support for N-3 versions of Istio. This long term support aligns Istio support with the underlying Kubernetes cluster and gives organizations the peace of mind that break fixes, security patches, and other Istio issues will be fixed with the type of enterprise support they require. 
• Istio for ARM – With new cloud providers releasing ARM instances that boost performance while decreasing cost, organizations’ ARM portfolio has become increasingly important and Solo.io has listened with ARM build. 
• Istio with FIPS –  Federal government agencies and those organizations serving them often need to comply with the Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS-2) to maintain a minimum level of security. Solo.io has the option for FIPS-2 compliant build of Istio’s data plane. 

What’s Next for Gloo Mesh? The Gloo Mesh team is working tirelessly on the new set of features based on what our customers and the community require in an Enterprise service mesh. 

• Routing locality rules for cross cluster service failover and ability to access closest geographical workload – e.g. one housed on east coast cluster vs. Asia.
• Upstream enhancements for Istio
• Full AWS App Mesh Support
• Metrics for a single or multiple clusters
• Virtual Mesh that includes AppMesh and Istio in a single logical mesh. 
• Istio lifecycle management 

To learn more about the features in the Beta release of Gloo Mesh please see the website, documentation and the public Github.   

You can also read about Making Web Assembly a first-class citizen on Gloo Mesh Enterprise Beta blog.

Try Gloo Mesh! 

You can request a free trial of Gloo Mesh today here. To connect, join the #gloo-mesh channel in the Solo.io Slack.