Introducing the First Developer Portal for Istio
Solo.io Announces the Industry-First Developer Portal for Istio Service Mesh
Solo.io’s new Developer Portal for Istio Improves and Accelerates Developer Onboarding Experience and API Management with Enhanced Security
The service mesh architecture is quickly becoming the industry standard for communication management in the microservices environment. Currently, there is no efficient way for organizations that use service mesh in their environment to catalog the APIs running in their environment, making it difficult to securely enable developers both inside and outside the company to leverage these APIs in their development process. At Solo, we heard from several of our customers how this hinders their ability to fully adopt the service mesh architecture. Today we are proud to announce a solution – the Developer Portal for Istio – which layers on top of Istio to help document, expose, and compose APIs.
The Developer Portal for Istio makes it easy for an application team to catalog the APIs running within a service mesh, and provides a great user experience to browse, consume, and document the APIs running in that service mesh. Once APIs are defined, they can be exposed through custom portals that group APIs and allow users to self-service for signup, obtaining security keys, and testing the APIs. Additionally, the Developer Portal enhances security for Istio with integration to authentication systems, Single Sign-On and API Keys capabilities.
Here are some of the main features of the Developer Portal for Istio and the benefits they provide.
API Management. The Developer Portal for Istio gives you everything you need to productize your APIs for easy consumption by internal users within your organization as well as external partners. Group your APIs into API Products and provide authorized, rate-limited access with ease.
The Developer Portal for Istio provides a seamless developer onboarding experience. The Developer Portal offers a Web UI, where API consumers can search, browse, and request access to published APIs at the click of a button. Through the Portal Web UI, developers can provision API Keys, browse generated documentation, and test APIs through the interactive API explorer.
Expose your APIs to external traffic without managing Ingress configuration. Automatically drive Istio routing and built-in authorization and rate limiting policies using your existing OpenAPI and gRPC Schemas. Istio Gateway, VirtualService, DestinationRule and EnvoyFilter custom resources will be automatically generated and optimized for the exact APIs you wish to publish, with per-consumer policies translated to low-level Istio configuration.
Drive the Developer Portal for Istio entirely with declarative configuration. All of the Developer Portal configurations can be provided as Kubernetes Custom Resources, making it the only API Management Solution which can be fully automated using GitOps workflows. A clean separation of responsibilities between each custom resource enables a fully self-service model, enabling API developers to independently define and publish their APIs without exposing sensitive service mesh configuration.
Rate Limiting and External Authorization. The Developer Portal for Istio adds custom Rate Limiting and External Authorization servers on top of Istio, enabling powerful Auth and Rate Limit policies for your APIs. The Developer Portal is the only existing solution to enable rate limiting and external authentication in Istio today.
Client Identity and Per-Client Policy. The Developer Portal for Istio brings the concept of API Consumers to the Istio Gateway, enabling advanced per-user policies such as Global Rate Limiting. This provides critical policy control over your APIs, enforcing tiered access plans and protecting against Denial-of-Service attacks.
Customized Security Solutions. The External Auth server provided by the Developer Portal for Istio supports a plethora of Authentication flows including OIDC, JWT and Single Sign-On (SSO). In addition, it can be easily extended through the use of custom plugins.
Custom Branding. The Developer Portal for Istio’s Web UI is fully customizable using Portal CRDs, allowing you to use company logos, images, colors, themes, as well as custom static content to produce a clean, out-of-the-box web application which developers can use to onboard and consume your APIs.
Getting Started
Check out this two part demo video on the Developer Portal for Istio to learn more and join Christian on an upcoming Youtube Live for a technical overview, demo and live Q&A.
We’re looking forward to having you try the Developer Portal and give feedback. Read more about today’s announcement in our press release and technical blog post.
