Solo.io adds API gateway to its service mesh management platform

Solo.io Inc., a startup that helps organizations address the management challenges of integrating software containers and microservices into their environments, today added an application programming interface gateway for managing incoming or “north/south” traffic to its Gloo Mesh Enterprise platform.

Gloo Mesh Enterprise provides management features for service meshes, giving administrators tools to track the status of their deployments as well as security controls that regulate interactions between services. The platform is based on Istio, a popular open-source project that extends the Kubernetes container orchestrator to support service meshes, and Envoy, an open-source service proxy.

“We built Gloo Mesh four years ago believing there would be more than one instance of service meshes in enterprises because of the use of multiple clusters,” said Idit Levine, Solo.io’s founder and chief executive. “Some of our customers have 80 to 120 clusters with Kubernetes instances of Istio running on them. How are you going to manage that?” she said.

The new Gloo Mesh Gateway is both an API gateway and a multi-cluster-aware Gloo Portal developer portal for API management and sharing. Gloo Portal is now fully integrated with Gloo Mesh Enterprise, enabling users to select the Gloo Mesh API gateway built on Istio or Gloo Mesh Core, which provides for multi-cluster and multi-mesh management capabilities built on Istio and the WebAssembly portable compilation target. The enhanced Gloo Mesh Enterprise unifies the process of setting up and managing multi-cluster and multi-mesh service mesh environments, the company said.

North-south management adds control for incoming traffic, complementing the inter-service communication that is typically called east-west. The combined features prevent cluster nodes from “taking too many resources and taking the cluster down,” Levine said. Gloo Mesh Enterprises already supports east-west traffic management.

Other new features include observability improvements that allow for monitoring, troubleshooting and behavior tracking; improved security certificate management through integration with external certificate providers and automated control-plane certificate rotation; support for the four most recent Istio releases; and discovery of multiple available ingress gateways for each managed service mesh.

Founded in 2017, Solo.io has raised more than $36 million. The company tripled revenus in its most recent quarter, Levine said without providing details. “We think we’ll multiply by five or six what we did last year, which was a lot,” she said.

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