We recently announced a Developer Portal for Istio service mesh. As service mesh is becoming the industry standard for managing service-to-service communication in microservices architecture, new tools are required to enable the developer and operator workflow. Istio is a popular open source service mesh solution built with Envoy as it’s sidecar proxy with an activity community backed by Google, IBM and Lyft. 

To better understand the adoption patterns, we asked the attendees of this webinar what the current usage status of Istio was in their organization. Many responses included multiple answers like “investing and evaluating” or that they were running Istio in evaluation, pre-production and production environments. With 45% of the respondents having hands on experience with Istio, they recognize the need for additional tools to enable the developer and operator workflows for their APIs. 

In this recorded webinar, you will learn how the Istio Developer Portal makes it possible for an application team to effectively catalog the APIs running in their service mesh, and provides a great user experience to help document, securely expose and consume APIs to developers both inside and outside of the organization. Get started by requesting a trial. 

In this session we cover:

• Secure API management to internal developers and external partners
• Declarative architecture and GitOps workflows 
• Flexible security solutions, integrations and policies
• Developer experience and onboarding 

Watch the replay here

Q&A Highlights

Is the Developer Portal for Istio and the one for Gloo the same? 

No, they are different. There are two developer portals available. The Gloo developer portal is a feature of our Gloo Enterprise API gateway which supports services running in or not on Kubernetes and Istio. The developer portal for Istio is designed only for Istio and can be deployed to any supported version of open source Istio. Enterprise support for Istio is also available from Solo.io for organizations interested in running upstream Istio. 

When do you use the Developer Portal for Gloo versus Istio? Can you explain the differences?

Gloo is our API Gateway and in March we released a Developer Portal for it. As an API gateway, Gloo adds a level of control and security at the edge to protect your backend services with capabilities like WAF, rate limiting, AuthN/AuthZ, Data Loss Prevention, and more in addition to traffic routing and shaping. Those services can be running in a service mesh (or not), in Kubernetes (or not), on-prem, in the cloud, and be a serverless function or any combination of the mentioned types. Gloo covers a broader range of application environments and capabilities. The Gloo Developer Portal is a feature to help catalog, manage and securely publish those APIs to developers inside and outside of your organization. The Developer Portal for Istio is specific only to clusters using Istio service mesh to catalog the running APIs and then publish them. 

Depending on your use case and the desired access you want to provide to your developers and partners, there are a number of ways to architect the environment and use one or both Developer Portals with different levels of internal versus external access. 

Are Tracing or Stats Available for these APIs in the Developer Portal?

Yes. Everything is running through the Gateway is running through Envoy Proxy and that telemetry can all be pulled from the proxies. For higher level stats like a per user or a customer per application type is something we are able to capture and we do that with Gloo and we will have something similar for the Developer Portal for Istio as well. We have more information on all the observability methods here. 

Is the Developer Portal pluggable to other UI frameworks?

Yes. Everything is running through the Gateway is running through Envoy Proxy and that telemetry can all be pulled from the proxies. For higher level stats like a per user or a customer per application type is something we are able to capture and we do that with Gloo and we will have something similar for the Developer Portal for Istio as well. We have more information on all the observability methods here. 

Download the presentation

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Learn more 

• About the Developer Portal 
• Read the documentation 
• Get started and request a trial 
• Questions? Join the community at slack.solo.io  

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