Introducing Gloo-NATS: Bring events to your API

Idit Levine | April 04, 2018

To be resilient, scalable, and efficient, an API Gateway should guarantee that requests are not dropped, are delivered with high performance, and can be fanned out easily to multiple subscribers. This is only possible by integrating a messaging system into the core of the gateway itself.

Until today, there were no existing gateways that leveraged a messaging system. We at Solo are excited to announce the integration of Gloo — our next-generation gateway — with the NATS messaging system. Using the power of NATS, Gloo guarantees message delivery, vastly improved performance, and buffering of messages during times of load.

Gloo is Solo’s Function Gateway built on top of the powerful Envoy Proxy. Gloo provides a unified entrypoint to serverless and API functions. Read more about Gloo here and here.

NATS is an open source, lightweight, high-performance, cloud-native messaging system. It implements a highly scalable publish-subscribe (pub/sub) distribution model. The performant nature of NATS makes it an ideal base for building modern, reliable, scalable cloud native distributed systems. The CNCF recently announced that it will become the official home of the NATS project.

With this announcement we are adding another filter to enhance Envoy:

NATS filter: Enables transforming incoming HTTP Requests into messages that are routed directly to a NATS cluster. Envoy handles the request transformation, establishing the connection, and speaking the NATS protocol, making the client completely independent from speaking the NATS API.

Gloo now provides seamless client-side integration with NATS by translating simple HTTP requests (even from a browser) to the NATS protocol, enabling persistence of requests, and high-performance asynchronous processing by connected services. Through Gloo, your HTTP requests now become events to power an event-driven architecture.

Take a look at our demos to experience the performance and scaling benefits Gloo’s NATS integration provides.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhI9PUv5JcQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mtvPrHfX1Q

We encourage you to visit our GitHub repo for Gloo here. Join our growing community on slack.

About the Author

Idit Levine

Idit Levine is the founder and CEO of Solo.io. She founded Solo.io with the idea to create tools that help organizations meaningfully adopt cloud-native technologies alongside their existing IT investments. Idit has a long history in cloud, infrastructure and open source in both startup and large enterprise companies. Prior to Solo.io she was CTO of the EMC Cloud Management Division, a member of the global CTO office, and held technical leadership roles at Dynamic Ops, VMware, CloudSwitch, and Verizon.