Liveblog: Wrapping Up Day 1 at SoloCon ’22

Rose Sawvel | March 08, 2022

The first day at SoloCon 2022 was very exciting! From an all-star line-up at the opening keynote and welcome to a multitude of news announcements, helpful sessions, and more, we’ll recap a few highlights here. Also, keep an eye inside the event as sessions continue to stream in times for attendees in EMEA and APAC.

Catch up: Opening keynote and welcome

The day kicked off with an engaging opening keynote featuring Idit Levine (Founder and CEO at Solo.io) and Christian Posta (Global Field CTO at Solo.io) alongside Solomon Hykes (Founder of Docker, and now Founder of Dagger.io) and Louis Ryan (Co-creator of Istio) to welcome us with stories about how microservices were born, and how technologies in the cloud native ecosystem have evolved to answer questions and solve problems. If you didn’t make it to this keynote live, keep an eye out for when it becomes available on demand. There are some really interesting and highly relevant unique stories here that you won’t catch anywhere else.

Today’s news and announcements

Solo.io has gained tremendous momentum over the past year, and shared key announcements and news updates earlier today. We’ve pulled together a list of top news announcements in case you didn’t catch them in real time. Here are some highlights:

Gloo Mesh 2.0: Today, Solo.io announced Gloo Mesh Enterprise 2.0 which delivers new enhancements for customers who are managing hundreds of Kubernetes clusters, up to 100 million transactions per day, thousands of internal APIs, as well as large and diverse development teams. Updated capabilities include:
- New multi-tenant workspaces allow organizations to easily define fine-grained access control and editing permissions based on roles for shared infrastructure, enabling teams to collaborate in large environments. Users can manage traffic, establish workspace dependencies, define cluster namespaces, and control destinations directly in the UI — and policies can be easily re-used and adapted using labels.
- A new, cohesive Gloo Mesh API for Istio management that enables developers to configure rules and policies for both north-south traffic and east-west traffic from a single, unified API. The new API also simplifies the process of expanding from a single cluster to dozens or hundreds of clusters.
- New Gloo Mesh UI for observability provides service topology graphs that highlight network traffic, latency, and speeds while automatically saving the new state when you move clusters or nodes. Users get better readability with clean icons, colors, and the size of lines. Plus, customers can view TCP metrics and time ranges at a glance and expand to full screen to see everything at once.
- Improved VM support that reduces the time and the amount of code required to add VMs to Istio service mesh environments; also supports all existing applications running in VM environments.
GraphQL for Gloo Edge Beta: Solo.io announced today that GraphQL for Gloo Edge is now in beta! Solo.io has been exploring common patterns, benefits and limitations of standalone GraphQL, along with how to combine GraphQL with Envoy Proxy, and why Gloo Edge is a great platform for success. Find more details in this new blog that was published earlier today.
New executive team growth: Apart from product news and announcements, Solo.io also announced a growing executive team. The newest executive team members include Rob Bailer as CFO and Brian Gracely as VP of Product Strategy. The announcement follows a momentous year of growth and innovation for Solo.io that included triple-digit customer growth and the unveiling of several industry “first and only” product updates that enable organizations to connect application services, service meshes, clusters, and clouds.

Highlights from sessions and lighting talks

In the Americas time zone, there were 19 sessions that streamed online today across three topic tracks, including the opening keynote, two product roadmaps, and five lightning talks. Sessions will continue streaming overnight for attendees in EMEA and APAC. Top topics we found included GraphQL, eBPF, multi-cloud, observability, scaling in production, and security, to name a few. If any of these topics interest you, be sure to register for the event to catch this content.

More than just sessions at SoloCon 2022

We also explored the virtual venue and found some interesting places you should check out:

Expo Hall: Don’t miss this, it’s full of info about BumbleBee and eBPF, GraphQL, Gloo Mesh, Gloo Edge, Gloo Portal, Solo Academy, and a job board where you can find info about open positions at Solo.io.
Treasure Hunt: There’s a treasure hunt going on! If you’re one of the first 22 (in honor of SoloCon ‘22) people to answer the quiz by finding the Treasure Hunt logo hidden in five places throughout the event, you can win a custom SoloCon beanie.
Coloring Book: Hit up the Solo Academy booth in the Expo Hall to find a commemorative take-home SoloCon 2022 coloring book PDF that you can download for the kids (or yourself!) for free.
Networking: There are also networking opportunities if you’re interested in connecting with others from the Istio, eBFP, GraphQL and cloud native communities. There’s a networking feature in the event, plus info about how to join Solo.io’s Slack channel to get direct access to Solo’s team with questions.

Overnight and into tomorrow

Many of the sessions that were broadcast in the Americas time zone today will also stream overnight for attendees in APAC, and into tomorrow for attendees in EMEA as well. Lightning talks from today will make it into the Replay area in case you missed them. See you tomorrow!