Solo.io's commercial platform integrates a cloud-based API gateway and a service mesh

Sep, 2021 - By SMI

Solo was the first to facilitate a custom developer portal for Istio with Gloo Portal, and together, with Gloo Mesh Gateway, Solo is the first to provide a comprehensive API gateway for Istio.

Perhaps it’s a hard effort to connect to all the operations and microservices required in a current cloud-native corporate application. The recent release of its Gloo Mesh Enterprise product is one domain in which Solo.io is seeking to revolutionize. Since it was established, Solo has focused on a service mesh idea. A service mesh offers an efficient way in an automated manner, commonly in a Kubernetes native environment, to link multiple components collectively.

Solo's Gloo Mesh Enterprise API and service mesh components were independent technologies with separate settings and control planes. This is about to change with the merging of API and service mesh capabilities into a single service. The combined features should make it easier to set up and configure a wide range of cloud services based on Kubernetes.

The Gloo Mesh service mesh developed by Solo is built on Google's open-source Istio project. Gloo Edge is the name of the API product, which is based on the open-source Envoy project, that was developed by the ride-hailing firm Lyft. Levine noted that her team has now improved their connection with Envoy by utilizing Istio's plugin architecture.

According to Idit Levine, CEO, and founder of solo, many customers begin with an API gateway and subsequently progress to using the service mesh. She anticipates that with the new Gloo Mesh Enterprise upgrade, customer adoption will increase even faster, as Solo will be able to differentiate itself from competitors in both the service mesh and API management areas. Gloo Edge supports REST-based APIs, which are by far the most used today, but not the upcoming GraphQL API standard, that is gaining popularity. Levine advised Solo and its platform to stay tuned for a forthcoming GraphQL announcement.