Gloo Edge 1.15: API Gateway Evolution

Introduction

Gloo Edge 1.15, released on October 8, 2022, continues to evolve as a powerful API gateway and ingress controller for Kubernetes. This release introduces Gateway API support, improves performance, and delivers advanced security features for modern cloud-native applications.

Networking changes tend to show up under pressure: rolling upgrades, failovers, and the ‘why can’t it connect?’ moments. This release is worth a look if you care about predictable traffic behavior and simpler troubleshooting in real clusters.

Gateway API Support

• Gateway API implementation provides native support for the Kubernetes Gateway API standard.
• HTTPRoute support enables sophisticated routing rules and traffic management.
• TLSRoute capabilities enable secure routing with automatic certificate management.
• BackendRef improvements provide better service and endpoint selection.

Performance Improvements

1. Envoy integration updates leverage latest Envoy performance improvements.
2. Connection handling optimizations reduce latency and improve throughput.
3. Resource usage improvements reduce CPU and memory footprint.
4. Scaling enhancements enable better handling of high-traffic scenarios.

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 enables correlation of requests across services.
• Access logs improvements provide more detailed request/response information.
• Dashboard integration provides visualization of gateway traffic and health.

Kubernetes Integration

• Ingress support improvements provide better compatibility with Kubernetes Ingress resources.
• Gateway API support enables modern ingress configuration aligned with Kubernetes standards.
• Service discovery improvements automatically discover Kubernetes services and endpoints.
• CRD support enables managing routes and virtual services as Kubernetes-native resources.

Getting Started

helm repo add gloo https://storage.googleapis.com/solo-public-helm
helm install gloo gloo/gloo --version 1.15.0 --namespace gloo-system --create-namespace

Create a Gateway:

apiVersion: gateway.networking.k8s.io/v1beta1
kind: Gateway
metadata:
  name: my-gateway
  namespace: gloo-system
spec:
  gatewayClassName: gloo
  listeners:
  - name: web
    protocol: HTTP
    port: 80

Create an HTTPRoute:

apiVersion: gateway.networking.k8s.io/v1beta1
kind: HTTPRoute
metadata:
  name: my-route
  namespace: gloo-system
spec:
  parentRefs:
  - name: my-gateway
  rules:
  - matches:
    - path:
        type: PathPrefix
        value: /api
    backendRefs:
    - name: api-service
      port: 8080

Summary

Gloo Edge 1.15 continues to evolve as a leading API gateway solution, providing teams with powerful tools for managing ingress traffic and API routing in Kubernetes with modern standards support.