Gloo Edge 1.18: API Gateway Excellence and Advanced Routing

Introduction

API gateways earn their value when APIs sprawl: multiple teams, multiple versions, and the constant need to add auth, rate limits, and routing logic without pushing every change into application code.

Gloo Edge 1.18, released on August 30, 2025, focuses on the practical gateway essentials—richer routing, stronger security controls, improved observability, and better integration options—so teams can manage microservices (and serverless-style) APIs with fewer bespoke edge components.

Why this matters in practice

• Safer rollouts at the edge: traffic splitting and circuit breaking help you ship API changes without a big-bang cutover.
• Security consistency: centralized authn/z and mTLS/WAF integration reduces “every team does it differently.”
• Protocol reality: GraphQL/gRPC/WebSocket support matters once your API surface is more than REST.

API Gateway Enhancements

• Advanced routing capabilities enable sophisticated traffic management including header-based routing, query parameter matching, and request body inspection.
• Rate limiting improvements provide more flexible throttling strategies including per-user, per-IP, and per-header rate limiting with redis-backed distributed limits.
• Authentication enhancements expand support for OAuth2, JWT, API keys, and custom authentication mechanisms with better token validation.
• Authorization improvements enable fine-grained access control with RBAC policies and custom authorization logic.

Routing Improvements

1. Traffic splitting enhancements enable sophisticated canary deployments, blue-green rollouts, and percentage-based traffic distribution with automatic health-based promotion.
2. Request transformation improvements provide powerful request modification including header manipulation, body transformation, and URL rewriting.
3. Response transformation capabilities enable dynamic response modification for API versioning and response format conversion.
4. Circuit breaking enhancements improve resilience during service failures with configurable thresholds and automatic recovery.

GraphQL & Protocol Support

• GraphQL support enables GraphQL API gateway capabilities including query validation, rate limiting, and caching.
• gRPC enhancements provide better support for gRPC traffic including load balancing, health checking, and protocol translation.
• WebSocket improvements enable better WebSocket connection handling with connection pooling and load balancing.
• REST optimizations ensure optimal performance for REST APIs with improved caching and request handling.

Security Features

1. mTLS support enables mutual TLS for service-to-service communication with automatic certificate management.
2. WAF integration provides web application firewall capabilities for protecting APIs from common attacks.
3. DDoS protection enhancements improve resilience against denial-of-service attacks with rate limiting and request filtering.
4. Policy enforcement enables consistent security policies across all APIs with centralized policy management.

Getting Started

# Install Gloo Edge
helm repo add gloo https://storage.googleapis.com/solo-public-helm
helm install gloo gloo/gloo --namespace gloo-system --create-namespace --version 1.18.0

Summary

Gloo Edge 1.18 continues to provide powerful API gateway capabilities, making it easier to manage, secure, and observe APIs in Kubernetes environments.