Introducing Gloo Federation for Multi-Cluster API Gateway Management

In the last year we witnessed growth in the scale and complexity of the environments of our enterprise customers. Multi-cluster environments are quickly becoming the rule rather than the exception. Such environments require multiple instances of API gateways, and indeed many of our customers run numerous instances of Gloo, our Envoy-based next-generation API gateway. 

Scalability was always one of the most important goals in our design of Gloo, which is second to none in its ability to work at scale. With many of our customers taking advantage of this strength and continuously increasing the number of Gloo instances running in their environment, we sought for ways to make it easier and more powerful for them to operate their cohort of Gloos. 

Today we are excited to announce the next evolution of Gloo, with the release of Gloo Federation, giving enterprises the ability to scale their API gateway and management capabilities across clusters, sites and regions. Gloo Federation has two goals: to simplify and globalize your management of multiple Gloo instances across multiple clusters, and to provide you with advanced multi-cluster control features. 

Gloo Federation gives you a single pane of glass through which you can view all your services across clusters and clouds, enabling consistent configuration, unified debugging, and automated Gloo discovery across all Gloo instances. You can also configure Gloo instances to work together to bring failover capabilities and location-based routing.  

Gloo Federation features include:

  • Global Dashboard: This read-only UI provides a quick “status view” of all configurations across Gloo instances and managed clusters. Teams get deep visibility into the environment to pinpoint issues for effective troubleshooting.
  • Federated Configuration: This feature allows teams to configure all Gloo instances from a single point, with optional templates and grouping.
  • Multi-Cluster Failover Routing: Gloo Federation enables application resilience with failover capabilities by routing traffic between Gloo instances, and encrypts the traffic to the new cluster. Automatic discovery enables locality-weighted load balancing among failover destinations.
  • Location-Based Routing: Gloo Federation’s global view allows rerouting requests to another cluster based on location or user identity.
  • Role-Based Access Control: User-based permissions and access at the multi-cluster level allow teams to create, update, or delete various resource types and cluster or namespace destinations. 

We invite you to try learn more about Gloo Federation, try it for your environment, and attend an upcoming webinar for a deep dive. Our team is here to help you along the way. Happy Gloo-ing!