Gloo Edge 1.11: API Gateway and Ingress Controller

Introduction

Gloo Edge 1.11 — API Gateway and Ingress Controller — was released on September 10, 2021.

Edge and east-west traffic paths tend to be where reliability and security issues show up first — so small gateway and proxy changes can have outsized impact.

In this release: Gloo Edge 1.11 enhances the API gateway with improved Envoy integration, better Kubernetes support, and advanced traffic management features for cloud-native applications.

Envoy Integration Enhancements

• Envoy version updates leverage latest Envoy performance improvements and features.
• xDS API improvements provide better control plane integration with Envoy.
• Filter chain enhancements enable more sophisticated request/response processing.
• Performance optimizations reduce latency and improve throughput.

Kubernetes Integration Improvements

1. Ingress support enhancements provide better compatibility with Kubernetes Ingress resources.
2. Gateway API support (experimental) enables modern ingress configuration.
3. Service discovery improvements automatically discover Kubernetes services and endpoints.
4. CRD support enables managing routes and virtual services as Kubernetes-native resources.

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 Features

• 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 enables 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 --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 1.11 continues to evolve as a leading API gateway solution, providing teams with powerful tools for managing ingress traffic and API routing in Kubernetes.