Happy New Year from all of us at Solo.io! 2019 has been a whirlwind of a year since coming out of stealth in December 2018 including being named as one of the hottest cloud startups to watch by CRN and a company to watch in 2020 by SDTimes. We have also been recognized as a Cool Vendor in the 2019 Gartner Cool Vendors for Connecting Digital Workplace Applications and Services*.

We are especially thankful for the opportunity to work with you to build cloud-native tools for Kubernetes, Envoy Proxy, and Service Mesh — and we are excited to head into the new year with you. Below is a recap of our 2019 milestones:

Launching Gloo 1.0

We reached a major product milestone in November with the 1.0 release of Gloo, our Envoy Proxy based API gateway and Kubernetes ingress controller. Learn more in the launch announcement here and the customers using Gloo in production today.

New Features in Gloo 1.0 include:

• TCP Proxy: Gloo now supports TCP proxying in addition to HTTP, to act as a central point for secure access to workloads like databases, caches and message queues.
• Web Application Firewall: Gloo is the only API Gateway with a built-in WAF capability, to inspect and filter out potentially harmful traffic before it enters your environment. To achieve this, Gloo configures a custom-built Envoy filter that invokes ModSecurity.
• Authentication and Authorization: Gloo configures and enforces authentication and authorization of requests before granting access to application services. The do-it-yourself deployment is available in Gloo open source through the Envoy filter. Gloo Enterprise includes out of the box implementations of leading enterprise and modern auth models including API Keys, JWT, LDAP, OAuth, OIDC, Open Policy Agent and allows for custom solutions.
• Delegation: Gloo supports several models for safely distributing ownership of route configuration across your organization. Admins can own a set of routes, and delegate management of specific subpaths to other users. In this way, teams can quickly deploy and reconfigure services without disrupting other teams.
• Data Loss Prevention: Gloo extends Envoy with custom, powerful transformation capabilities on request and response traffic. Recently, Gloo leveraged these capabilities to start supporting Data Loss Prevention, to prevent sensitive data flowing across your application from leaving the gateway. For Gloo customers, this can be critical to ensure regulatory compliance like PCI and HIPAA.
• WebAssembly: WebAssembly promises to lower the barrier to entry for development on the web, and for Gloo that means making it easier to build custom Envoy and Gloo extensions in any programming language. Across the community, WebAssembly is still an emerging technology, but Gloo is starting to support it as an experimental feature.
• Rate Limiting: Gloo allows you to configure the amount of incoming traffic to your application in order to maintain the service performance, and protect against failures or malicious traffic (such as DOD attacks). Implement a simple rate limiting API to set up rate limiting in open source Gloo, or leverage the powerful rate limiting implementation that ships with Enterprise Gloo.
• Admin Console: The Gloo web dashboard streamlines observability and operations with easy to view health status, performance and alerts when there are issues. Open source users get access to a read-only console to easily share the status of the environment while Gloo Enterprise has an interactive console to directly manage the environment

More Technology News

In addition to Gloo, we spent a lot of time with service mesh and building tools to help teams deploy and manage service meshes and extend the service mesh with new functionality into their application environment.

Gloo Shot: We announced Gloo Shot for Service Mesh Enabled Chaos Engineering. This open source project is an example of how the sidecars can be leveraged to inject failures and latency to proactively seek out weak points in microservices applications before they become production problems that impact your customers. Read more here

Service Mesh Hub: To help organizations get started with service mesh, we launched a new product named Service Mesh Hub — a unified dashboard to manage and operate any service mesh. Service Mesh Hub allows operators to install, discover and operate service meshes and apply extensions (custom or 3rd party software) that add features into the service mesh environment. Read more here

Service Mesh Interface (SMI) Specification: With the service mesh market evolving and expanding, the need for standardization arises to preserve a great user experience with innovation. With that in mind, Solo.io partnered with Microsoft as a launch partner for the Service Mesh Interface Specification. Read more here

Gloo 1.0: As mentioned earlier, this was an exciting milestone to reach with our customers and end users in just a little over a year and a half of development with the community. Now both the open source and enterprise versions of Gloo are production-ready for application environments of all sizes. Learn more here

Autopilot: At the inaugural ServiceMeshCon North America, our founder Idit Levine unveiled Autopilot — our latest open source project to build opinionated operators for service mesh. Much like the operator framework for Kubernetes, Autopilot aims to help admins automate the configuration and operations of the service mesh to make it aware of and adaptive to the changes in the environment. Read more here and watch the tutorials to start building your own operators.

Web Assembly Hub: Our last announcement of the year empowers end users to add new functionality to their Envoy Proxy based technologies with WebAssembly. Envoy Proxy has risen in popularity for its speed and extensibility via filters. However the filters are difficult to write, deploy and maintain — as they are written in C++ and require compiling with a version of Envoy Proxy. With the recently introduced support for WebAssembly, filters can be written in any language that can be dynamically added / modified as a module at runtime thus eliminating the need to maintain a separate version of Envoy Proxy. Read more here and check out the Hub.

Around the World with the Community

Beyond the new product releases and features built, our team grew and we traveled all around the world to meet you at your local meetup, give talks and workshops and join in discussions. We hosted many online events with you to talk about how the community is using Kubernetes, Cloud, Envoy Proxy and Service Mesh — and have been planning for lots of new online series to continue the discussion.

As we look forward to 2020, we are looking forward to meeting and building with you.

• Learn more about Solo.io
• Join the community slack and follow us online
• Find us at an event online or near you

* Gartner, Cool Vendors for Connecting Digital Workplace Applications and Services, by Christopher Trueman, Adam Preset, Rashmi Choudhary, Lane Severson, 17 October 2019 (report available to Gartner subscribers)

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