Solo.io has extended its portfolio of tools aimed at microservices with Gloo Cloud, an Istio Service Mesh offered as a hosted service that can connect service traffic across clusters, data centres and even different clouds. The firm has also added multi-cluster observability to Gloo Mesh and updated its Gloo Edge to function as an Istio-native API Gateway.
Gloo Cloud is claimed by Solo.io as the first Istio Service Mesh as a Service, able to connect microservices-based applications across environments, whether on a cloud platform or on-premises, or a hybrid deployment. As the name suggests, the new service is based around the Istio open-source tool for managing traffic flow among microservices, enforcing policies and gathering telemetry data.
According to Solo.io, Gloo Cloud provides the full benefits of Istio, including global service load balancing, end-to-end zero-trust security, and federated traffic and access control. It also includes advanced features such as complex rate limiting, usage plans, and billing use cases. As a hosted service, Solo.io is responsible for complete lifecycle management of Istio, saving organisations from the chore of installing and maintaining it. Gloo Cloud also provides a single pane of glass for operating a service mesh across any infrastructure.
Gloo Mesh, the firm’s multi-cluster, multi-mesh management tool now features multi-cluster observability features. These are an improvement on the capabilities offered by Istio alone that focus on obtaining metrics and access logs for applications running in a single cluster.
The updated Gloo Mesh solves traffic routing issues with Gloo Mesh Virtual Destinations. This is a capability designed to maximise persistence and minimise latency by automatically routing traffic to the nearest healthy service, or to a failover destination, if issues occur.
According to Solo.io, providing high availability of applications across clusters, zones, and regions was a significant challenge before. Now, Gloo Mesh defines a virtual destination, which is a set of all possible traffic destinations, and uses localisation information and real-time detection of available and unresponsive services to route requests to the closest available destination.
Solo.io says it has combined its Gloo Edge API Gateway with Istio to create the first Istio-Native API Gateway. Gloo Edge 2.0 provides multi-cluster support by acting as a single virtual gateway spanning multiple clusters. The company claims that Gloo Edge 2.0 is also the first API Gateway to fully adopt the recently-announced Kubernetes Gateway API.