Announcing Gloo Platform 2.2

Solo is excited to release the newest, most scalable, version of Gloo Platform today. In our past release we introduced Gloo Platform, which can be used as a standalone gateway, mesh, and networking product or combined to unleash the best end-to-end application networking platform available. In Gloo Platform v2.2, we focused our engineers on customer requests and scalability, as our existing customers grow to deploy the largest service mesh implementations in the world.

Scalability enhancements

With the introduction of Gloo Platform v2.2, we are focusing on how we can make Gloo Platform better at supporting our users as they scale to new heights. Organizations need to ensure their applications can grow as they embrace the cloud native world, and application networking needs to scale to embrace a multi-cloud world. The API gateway and service mesh also need to scale. At the same time, security needs to extend to wherever these applications need to be deployed.

As our users continue to rely on Gloo Platform to meet these needs, we continue to reduce the obstacles that hinder them:

• Faster platform with new benchmarks – Over the course of the past few releases we have worked with customers to understand their users SLAs and have improved Gloo Platform translation time by over 20x. It now takes seconds to translate service updates between Istio and Gloo Mesh even when there are thousands of existing services.
• Enhanced observability scale – Gloo Platform has an updated metrics stack that relies on OpenTelemetry, under the same CNCF umbrella as Istio and Kubernetes, that was tested and able to handle a metrics load of 189,000 requests per second. In future, even larger benchmarks are achievable with more memory.
• Release hardening – With all the changes in scale, we wanted to ensure that any new enhancement or bug fix did not lead to a regression in our high water benchmarks. Each new release of Gloo Platform undergoes a battery of scale, soak, and use case testing to ensure that it will deliver the same or outperform previous releases.

Find out more about how we are addressing scalability challenges in a future blog post this week from our Head of Product Chris Gaun.

Lambda support

As our users are looking at scaling their applications, there are some functions best suited for using AWS Lambda and its serverless capabilities. With Gloo Platform v2.2, Lambda functions are now easier to integrate into an organization’s service mesh or API gateway.

Read more about how to include Lambda functions in this blog post from Solo Product Manager Ben Lilley.

GraphQL updates

GraphQL is an excellent tool for discovering data across multiple sources in a single query. We have continued to expand the set of features available to GraphQL users in the Gloo Platform 2.2 release. With GraphQL built into the Envoy proxy, it is easier to call GraphQL through your service mesh and API gateway with Gloo Platform 2.2.

Learn more about Gloo Platform GraphQL in an upcoming blog post this week.

Certificate rotation

Security is also more challenging at scale, and managing certificate rotation is an obstacle every organization faces. We have simplified the certificate management interface in Gloo Platform v2.2 to generate the new certificate and propagate to the clusters and workloads. This feature allows users to rotate intermediate Istio certificates with zero downtime. In the upcoming beta releases we will add the ability to easily rotate root and Gloo Platform’s relay certificates.

Sneak preview: What’s cooking for Gloo Platform

There are many exciting enhancements coming to Gloo Platform v2.3 in April 2023. In the meantime, Beta versions of Gloo Platform will soon include some enhancements users can test out and provide feedback on:

• Support for Kubernetes 1.25 – There was a breaking API change in Kubernetes that required engineering work beyond the normal testing we do for the new version of Kubernetes. We expect Kubernetes 1.25 to be supported in one of the first v2.3 Betas.
• GraphQL schema stitching – Stitching is a key feature of our GraphQL solution, providing the ability to create a unified data graph from multiple GraphQL APIs. Schema stitching will be available in our initial Gloo Platform 2.3 beta releases, allowing users to get hands-on with this feature ahead of GA.
• Multi-region high availability – Gloo Platform includes capability to have multiple replicas of the management plane, but users have asked for full automated regional failover. This level of high availability is beyond keeping the data plane up and will allow users to quickly failover to a new management plane and never lose configuration changes to services, policies, etc.

Try Gloo Platform today!

Test drive Gloo Platform 2.2 today by requesting a free trial. If you would like to learn more about Gloo Platform or any of the component products in the Gloo Platform, our documentation page has all the details. And if you still have questions (or just want to give us some feedback), we have a public Slack community available for anyone to join. We’d love to hear from you!

Let us help you meet all your 2023 cloud native resolutions!