Prepare to upgrade

Before you upgrade Gloo Gateway, complete the following preparatory steps:

• Prepare your environment, such as upgrading your current version to the latest patch and upgrading any dependencies to the required supported versions.
• Review important changes made to Gloo Gateway in version 1.21, including CRD, Helm, CLI, and feature changes.
• Review frequently-asked questions about the upgrade process.

Prepare your environment

Review the following preparatory steps that might be required for your environment.

Upgrade your current minor version to the latest patch

Before you upgrade your minor version, first upgrade your current version to the latest patch. For example, if you currently run Gloo Gateway Enterprise version 1.20.7, first upgrade your installation to version 1.20.8. This ensures that your current environment is up-to-date with any bug fixes or security patches before you begin the minor version upgrade process.

1. Find the latest patch of your minor version by checking the Open Source changelog or Enterprise changelog.
2. Go to the documentation set for your current minor version. For example, if you currently run Gloo Gateway Enterprise version 1.20.7, use the drop-down menu in the header of this page to select v1.20.x.
3. Follow the upgrade guide, using the latest patch for your minor version.

If required, perform incremental minor version updates

If you plan to upgrade to a version that is more than one minor version greater than your current version, such as to version 1.21 from 1.19 or older, you must upgrade incrementally. For example, you must first use the upgrade guide in the v1.20.x documentation set to upgrade from 1.19 to 1.20, and then follow the upgrade guide in the v1.21.x documentation set to upgrade from 1.20 to 1.21.

Upgrade dependencies

Check that your underlying infrastructure platform, such as Kubernetes, and other dependencies run a version that is supported for 1.21.

1. Review the supported versions for dependencies such as Kubernetes, Istio, Helm, and more.
2. Compare the supported versions against the versions you currently use.
3. If necessary, upgrade your dependencies, such as consulting your cluster infrastructure provider to upgrade the version of Kubernetes that your cluster runs.

Consider settings to avoid downtime

You might deploy Gloo Gateway in Kubernetes environments that use the Kubernetes load balancer, or in non-Kubernetes environments. Depending on your setup, you can take additional steps to avoid downtime during the upgrade process.

• Kubernetes: Enable Envoy readiness and liveness probes during the upgrade. When these probes are set, Kubernetes sends requests only to the healthy Envoy proxy during the upgrade process, which helps to prevent potential downtime. The probes are not enabled in default installations because they can lead to timeouts or other poor getting started experiences.
• Non-Kubernetes: Configure health checks on Envoy. Then, configure your load balancer to leverage these health checks, so that requests stop going to Envoy when it begins draining connections.

Review version 1.21 changes

Review the following changes made to Gloo Gateway in version 1.21. For some changes, you might be required to complete additional steps during the upgrade process.

Breaking changes

Review the breaking changes in this release.

Envoy version upgrade

The Envoy dependency in Gloo Gateway 1.21 was upgraded from 1.35.x to 1.36.x. This change includes the following upstream breaking changes. For more information about these changes, see the changelog documentation for Envoy v1.36.

Envoy v1.36:

• ExtProc changes: Removed support for fail_open and FULL_DUPLEX_STREAMED configuration combinations. For more information, see the related Envoy pull request.

• Tracing changes: A route refresh now results in a tracing refresh. The trace sampling decision and decoration of the new route is applied to the active span. This change can be reverted by setting the runtime guard envoy.reloadable_features.trace_refresh_after_route_refresh to false. Note, that if pack_trace_reason is set to true (default value), a request that is marked as traced cannot be unmarked as traced after the tracing refresh.

• HTTP/2 default value changes: The following default values were changed.

  • The maximum number of concurrent streams in HTTP/2 changed from 2147483647 to 1024.
  • The initial stream window size in HTTP/2 changed from 256MiB to 16MiB.
  • The initial connection window size in HTTP/2 was changed from 256MiB to 24MiB.

  You can temporarily revert this change by setting the runtime guard envoy.reloadable_features.safe_http2_options to false.

• HTTP/1 CONNECT request changes: The HTTP/1.1 proxy transport socket now generates RFC 9110 compliant CONNECT requests that include a Host header by default. When the proxy address is configured via endpoint metadata, the transport socket now prefers hostname:port format over IP:port when the hostname is available. The legacy behavior that allows CONNECT requests without a Host header can be restored by setting the runtime flag envoy.reloadable_features.http_11_proxy_connect_legacy_format to true.

XSLT transformation deprecated

The XSLT transformation feature (Enterprise) is deprecated in Gloo Gateway v1.21.0 and will be removed in v1.22.0. If you use XSLT transformations, plan to use an external processing server to process this type of transformation. For more information, see External processing.

New features

The following features were introduced.

HTTPS tunneling support for Dynamic Forward Proxy

Starting in Gloo Gateway 1.21.0, the Dynamic Forward Proxy (DFP) supports HTTPS targets via HTTP CONNECT tunneling. Previously, CONNECT requests were forwarded as regular HTTP/1.1, causing HTTPS connections to fail.

To support this feature, a new connectTerminate field was introduced in the VirtualService. When set, Envoy terminates the CONNECT request and forwards the raw TCP payload to the upstream.

For configuration examples and verification steps, see HTTPS tunneling with Dynamic Forward Proxy.

Multiple extProc filter variants

Starting in Gloo Gateway Enterprise v1.21.0, you can configure up to three external processing (extProc) filters that run at different positions in the Envoy filter chain. Previously, only a single extProc filter was supported.

All three fields are available at the global Settings, HttpListenerOptions, VirtualHostOptions, and RouteOptions levels. You can enable or disable individual variants at the listener level with disableExtProcEarly and disableExtProcLate.

For more information, see ExtProc filter variants and the Header manipulation guide.

Regex matching for JWT claims

Starting in Gloo Gateway Enterprise v1.21.0, you can match JWT claims against regular expressions (regex) instead of the default exact string comparison. To enable regex matching, set the matcher field to REGEX_MATCH in the jwtPrincipal of your RBAC policy, and provide a regex pattern as the claim value. For example, to match an email claim against a pattern:

rbac:
  policies:
    viewer:
      principals:
      - jwtPrincipal:
          claims:
            email: "dev[0-1]@solo\\.io"
          matcher: REGEX_MATCH

For more information and additional examples, see Matching JWT claims with regex.

Changelogs

Check the changelogs for the type of Gloo Gateway deployment that you have. Focus especially on any Breaking Changes that might require a different upgrade procedure. For Gloo Gateway Enterprise, you might also review the open source changelogs because most of the proto definitions are open source.

• Open Source changelogs
• Enterprise changelogs: Keep in mind that Gloo Gateway Enterprise pulls in Gloo Gateway Open Source as a dependency. Although the major and minor version numbers are the same for open source and enterprise, their patch versions often differ. For example, open source might use version x.y.a but enterprise uses version x.y.b. If you are unfamiliar with these versioning concepts, see Semantic versioning. Because of the differing patch versions, you might notice different output when checking your version with glooctl version. For example, your API server might run Gloo Gateway Enterprise version 1.21.0, which pulls in Gloo Gateway Open Source version 1.21.0 as a dependency.

  ~ > glooctl version
  Client: {"version":"1.21.0"}
  Server: {"type":"Gateway","enterprise":true,"kubernetes":...,{"Tag":"1.21.0","Name":"grpcserver-ee","Registry":"quay.io/solo-io"},...,{"Tag":"1.21.0","Name":"discovery","Registry":"quay.io/solo-io"},...}
  

Feature changes

No feature changes are reported.

Frequently-asked questions

Review the following frequently-asked questions about the upgrade process. If you still aren’t sure about the version upgrade impact, or if your use case doesn’t quite fit the standard upgrade path, feel free to post in the #gloo or #gloo-enterprise channels of our public Slack.

How do I upgrade Gloo Gateway in testing or sandbox environments?

If downtime is not a concern for your use case, you can follow the Quick upgrade guide to update your Gloo Gateway installation.

Note that for sandbox or exploratory environments, the easiest way to upgrade is to uninstall Gloo Gateway by running glooctl uninstall --all. Then, re-install Gloo Gateway at the desired version by the following one of the installation guides.

How do I upgrade Gloo Gateway in a production environment, where downtime is unacceptable?

The basic helm upgrade process is not suitable for environments in which downtime is unacceptable. Instead, you can follow the Canary upgrade guide to deploy multiple version of Gloo Gateway to your cluster, and test the upgrade version before uninstalling the existing version.

Additionally, you might need to take steps to account for other factors such as Gloo Gateway version changes, probe configurations, and external infrastructure like the load balancer that Gloo Gateway uses. Consider setting up liveness probes and healthchecks in your environment.

What happens to my Gloo Gateway CRs during an upgrade? How do I handle breaking changes?

A typical upgrade of Gloo Gateway across minor versions should not cause disruptions to the existing Gloo Gateway state. In the case of a breaking change, Solo will communicate through the upgrade guides, changelogs, or other channels if you must make a specific adjustment to perform the upgrade. Note that you can always use the glooctl debug yaml command to download the current Gloo Gateway state to one large YAML manifest.

Is the upgrade procedure different if I am not a cluster administrator?

If you are not an administrator of your cluster, you might be unable to create custom resource definitions (CRDs) and other cluster-scoped resources, such as cluster roles and cluster role bindings. If you encounter an error related to these resources, you can disable their creation by including the following setting in your Helm values:

global:
  glooRbac:
    create: false

Otherwise, you can try performing an installation of Gloo Gateway that is scoped to a single namespace by including the following setting in your Helm values:

global:
  glooRbac:
    namespaced: true

Why do I get an error about re-creating CRDs when upgrading using helm install or helm upgrade?

Helm v2 does not manage CRDs well, and is not supported in Gloo Gateway. Upgrade to Helm v3, delete the CRDs, and try again.

Why do I get an error about a gateway-certgen job?

The upgrade creates a Kubernetes Job named gateway-certgen to generate a certificate for the validation webhook. The job contains the ttlSecondsAfterFinished value so that the cluster cleans up the job automatically, but because this setting is still in Alpha, your cluster might ignore this value. In this case, you might have an issue while upgrading in which the upgrade attempts to change the gateway-certgen job, but the change fails because the job is immutable. To fix this issue, you can delete the job, which already completed, and re-apply the upgrade.