Gloo Platform 2.3: Improving usability with Gloo Portal, Gloo GraphQL, and a new Gloo Gateway UX

Today we are thrilled to announce Gloo Platform 2.3. Our engineers have been hard at work making this release one of our most exciting. The usability improvements in Gloo Platform 2.3 make it easier than ever to manage the complexities of the cloud native experience. 

With Gloo Platform 2.3, you can enable more agility, deliver best-of-breed products, and align your centers of excellence. Let’s look at more of what’s in Gloo Platform 2.3.

Gloo Portal

Gloo Platform now allows developers to catalog, share, and manage their APIs using Gloo Portal. In developing the Gloo Portal implementation for Gloo Platform, we took a ground-up approach to address customer input. 

To offer an easy starting point, but to also allow for flexibility, Gloo Portal follows a “batteries included but swappable” model. We built an amazing portal that addresses all your basic needs, but also a REST API that provides a way to integrate into custom or third-party developer portal solutions. With this feature, you can build your own portal, expand upon ours, or integrate with a third-party offering like the open source Backstage. 

Gloo Portal works with your existing GitOps and CI/CD process to streamline your automation methods. We believe that API design, versioning, and development are intertwined and baked into the delivery process at most organizations.  

Gloo GraphQL updates

Gloo GraphQL support for both north-south AND east-west traffic in the Istio service mesh is now available with Gloo Platform. We deliver a better GraphQL experience by leveraging the core GraphQL filter implementation in Envoy while taking advantage of the unique control plane characteristics of Gloo Platform. Examples include the ability to perform multi-cluster composition, graph management using workspaces, and the ability to inject GraphQL data plane features in client sidecars. 

Schema stitching is a key feature our customers have been asking us to build into Gloo GraphQL. The introduction of schema stitching in Gloo GraphQL provides the ability to create a unified data graph from multiple GraphQL APIs. 

Profiles for installation: Easy button for Gloo Gateway 

A key value of the Gloo Platform is to bring simplicity to cloud native deployments and work with existing GitOps workflows. For Gloo Gateway, that means making it easier to deploy an API gateway that is built for Kubernetes. And what could be simpler than having a one-chart installation of Gloo Gateway with Helm? This improvement to the installation experience is just one way we have enhanced the user experience for our customers.

Kubernetes 1.25, Istio 1.17 support

More than one Kubernetes user was concerned about how to introduce the Kubernetes 1.25 release into their production environments. After a number of trusted APIs were deprecated, the 1.25 release cycle led to extra engineering efforts to ensure none of the deprecated APIs would interfere with operations. The engineering team at Solo has combed through all the changes and has built support for Kubernetes 1.25 into Gloo Platform 2.3 and the Gloo components our customers depend on every day.

As leaders in the Istio community, Solo is also committed to bringing new upstream Istio releases into our product offerings. With the release of Gloo Platform 2.3 we have included the 1.17 release of Istio to enhance our service mesh capabilities. A list of the Istio 1.17 enhancements is available from the Istio community website.

Commercial support for Ambient Mesh

Solo will be the first commercial company to support the Ambient Mesh functionality available in the upstream Istio project. The sidecar-less model simplifies service mesh for all Kubernetes deployments at 70 to 90% less cost than previous iterations of a sidecar-based Istio service mesh. Customer results can be found by automatically enabling zero trust security for containers in a pod. This should be the top priority for all existing Kubernetes deployments. 

Sneak preview: What’s next for Gloo Platform?

There are additional enhancements coming to Gloo Platform v2.4 targeted for release in July 2023. For those of you who can’t wait to see what’s next, Beta versions of Gloo Platform will soon include some enhancements for our users to test out and provide feedback on:

• Gloo Portal usage reporting and analytics supporting monetization 
• Improved high-availability features
• IPv6 support

Try Gloo Platform today!

Test drive Gloo Platform 2.3 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. If you still have questions (or just want to reach out with feedback), we have a public Slack community available for anyone to join and chat with us. We’d love to hear from you!