Envoy WASM filters with Gloo Edge

Support for Envoy WASM filters has been added to Gloo Edge Enterprise as of version 1.6.0+. This guide is specifically for Gloo Edge 1.6.0. Note, there may have been some changes to the configuration API since prior experimental versions.

Configuration

Getting started with WASM is simple, first we install Gloo Edge Enterprise.

Gloo Edge Enterprise can be installed using either glooctl or helm 3 as follows:

glooctl install gateway enterprise --license-key YOUR_LICENSE_KEY

helm repo add gloo https://storage.googleapis.com/solo-public-helm

helm repo update

helm install gloo glooe/gloo-ee --namespace gloo-system \
  --create-namespace --set-string license_key=YOUR_LICENSE_KEY

Once this process has been completed, gloo should be up and running in the gloo-system namespace.

To check run the following:

kubectl get pods -n gloo-system

NAME                                                  READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
api-server-5b57f68dc-dqfjk                            3/3     Running   0          77s
discovery-5ffdfb9898-js9j2                            1/1     Running   0          77s
extauth-6888f56db4-kgz2n                              1/1     Running   0          77s
gateway-569488695f-zpqnj                              1/1     Running   0          77s
gateway-proxy-9c954dc8-wt46j                          1/1     Running   0          77s
gloo-5984f6f655-ct97s                                 1/1     Running   0          77s
glooe-grafana-78c6f96db-qwnd2                         1/1     Running   0          77s
glooe-prometheus-kube-state-metrics-7f8fd8dd8-cfmqp   1/1     Running   0          77s
glooe-prometheus-server-6cc865559b-gl8wq              2/2     Running   0          76s
observability-6dd56c8468-xvwqc                        1/1     Running   0          77s
rate-limit-c4fb9fc5b-6gm4s                            1/1     Running   0          76s
redis-55d6dbb6b7-fg7wm                                1/1     Running   0          77s

Once all of the pods are up and running you are all ready to configure your first WASM filter. The API to configure the filter can be found here .

At the moment the config must live on the gateway level, this will change as the Envoy WASM api evolves. To configure a gateway to add a WASM filter, the gateway must be edited like so.

kubectl edit -n gloo-system gateways.gateway.solo.io gateway-proxy

and change the httpGateway object to the following:

  httpGateway:
    options:
      wasm:
        filters:
        - config:
            '@type': type.googleapis.com/google.protobuf.StringValue
            value: "world"
          image: webassemblyhub.io/sodman/example-filter:v0.5
          name: myfilter
          root_id: add_header_root_id

Once that is saved, the hard work has been done. All traffic on the http gateway will call the wasm filter.

If your image isn’t hosted on an image registry, such as WebAssembly Hub, you can load the filter from the wasm file directly instead:

  httpGateway:
    options:
      wasm:
        filters:
        - config:
            '@type': type.googleapis.com/google.protobuf.StringValue
            value: "world"
          filePath: filters-dir/my-filter.wasm
          name: myfilter
          root_id: add_header_root_id

When loading directly from file, you’ll need to ensure that the given filePath contains your .wasm file. One way to do this for example, would be using an initContainer on your gatewayProxy deployment to load the .wasm file into a shared volume.

To find our more information about WASM filters, and how to build/run them check out wasm.

In that repo you’ll find wasme, a tool for building and deploying Envoy WASM filters. wasme works with Gloo Edge Enterprise, Istio, and vanilla Envoy. Much more detailed information can be found there on how the filters work.

To find more information about WASM filters, and find more filters which can be included in Gloo Edge check out WebAssembly Hub!.