Gloo Edge 1.4: API Gateway Enhancements

Introduction

At some point, “an Ingress” stops being enough. As soon as you need consistent auth, rate limits, safe rollouts, and visibility across many teams and services, you’re really building an API gateway — whether you call it that or not.

Gloo Edge 1.4, released on September 15, 2020, is another step in hardening that gateway layer for day-2 operations: better performance, tighter Kubernetes integration, and more complete security controls on top of an Envoy-based foundation.

Where Gloo Edge fits

• North-south traffic control: when you want richer routing and policy than a minimal ingress setup provides.
• Platform guardrails: centralize authentication, authorization, and rate limiting so teams don’t re-implement them per service.
• Operational clarity: improve debugging with consistent logs/metrics/tracing at the edge where requests first enter the cluster.

Performance Improvements

• Envoy updates leverage latest Envoy Proxy performance improvements and optimizations.
• Connection pooling enhancements reduce latency and improve throughput for API requests.
• Resource usage optimizations reduce CPU and memory footprint.
• Caching improvements accelerate configuration updates and reduce control plane load.

Kubernetes Integration Enhancements

1. Ingress support improvements provide better compatibility with Kubernetes Ingress resources.
2. Service discovery enhancements automatically discover Kubernetes services and endpoints.
3. CRD improvements enable better management of routes and virtual services as Kubernetes resources.
4. RBAC integration provides fine-grained access control for gateway configuration.

Advanced Traffic Management

• Rate limiting improvements provide more sophisticated throttling strategies.
• Circuit breaking enhancements improve resilience during service failures.
• Retry policies enable automatic request retries with configurable backoff strategies.
• Load balancing improvements provide better distribution of traffic across backends.

Security Enhancements

• TLS termination improvements provide better certificate management and rotation.
• mTLS support enables mutual TLS for service-to-service communication.
• Authentication enhancements expand OAuth2, JWT, and API key support.
• Authorization improvements provide fine-grained access control policies.

Observability & Monitoring

• Metrics expansion exposes detailed gateway metrics for Prometheus integration.
• Distributed tracing support improves correlation of requests across services.
• Access logs improvements provide more detailed request/response information.
• Dashboard integration provides visualization of gateway traffic and health.

Getting Started

helm repo add gloo https://storage.googleapis.com/solo-public-helm
helm install gloo gloo/gloo --version 1.4.0 --namespace gloo-system --create-namespace

Create a VirtualService:

apiVersion: gateway.solo.io/v1
kind: VirtualService
metadata:
  name: my-app
  namespace: gloo-system
spec:
  virtualHost:
    domains:
    - my-app.example.com
    routes:
    - matchers:
      - prefix: /
      routeAction:
        single:
          upstream:
            name: my-service
            namespace: gloo-system

Summary

Gloo Edge 1.4 builds on the production-ready foundation, providing teams with enhanced capabilities for managing ingress traffic and API routing in Kubernetes environments.