Set up Gloo Gateway

Start with setting up Gloo Gateway as an API gateway for your cluster.

In the following steps, you install the Gloo Gateway control plane and gateway proxy. When you install the Gloo Gateway control plane, a deployment named gloo-mesh-mgmt-server is created to translate and implement Gloo configurations that you create in other guides, such as controlling traffic with Gloo policies. The Gloo Gateway control plane also installs an ingress gateway proxy in your cluster named istio-ingressgateway. You can use the Gloo Gateway control plane to fully manage the lifecycle of this gateway proxy.

1. Create or use an existing Kubernetes cluster, and save the cluster name in an environment variable. Note: The cluster name must be alphanumeric with no special characters except a hyphen (-), lowercase, and begin with a letter (not a number).

   export CLUSTER_NAME=<cluster_name>
   

2. Install meshctl, the Gloo command line tool for bootstrapping Gloo Platform, registering clusters, describing configured resources, and more. Be sure to download version 2.3.4, which uses the latest Gloo Gateway installation values.

   curl -sL https://run.solo.io/meshctl/install | GLOO_MESH_VERSION=v2.3.4 sh -
   export PATH=$HOME/.gloo-mesh/bin:$PATH
   

3. Install Gloo Gateway in your cluster. This command uses a basic profile to install the control plane components, such as the management server and Prometheus server, and the data plane components, such as the agent, gateway proxy, rate limit server, and external auth server, in your cluster. If you do not have a license key, contact an account representative.

   meshctl install --profiles gloo-gateway-demo \
     --set common.cluster=$CLUSTER_NAME \
     --set licensing.glooGatewayLicenseKey=$GLOO_GATEWAY_LICENSE_KEY
   

4. Verify that Gloo Gateway is correctly installed. This check might take a few seconds to verify that:

   • Your Gloo Platform product licenses are valid and current.
   • The Gloo Platform CRDs are installed at the correct version.
   • The Gloo Gateway pods are running and healthy.
   • The Gloo agent is running and connected to the management server.

   meshctl check
   

   Example output:

   🟢 License status
   
    INFO  gloo-gateway enterprise license expiration is 25 Aug 23 10:38 CDT
    INFO  Valid GraphQL license module found
   
   🟢 CRD version check
   
   🟢 Gloo Platform deployment status
   
   Namespace        | Name                           | Ready | Status 
   gloo-mesh        | gloo-mesh-agent                | 1/1   | Healthy
   gloo-mesh        | gloo-mesh-mgmt-server          | 1/1   | Healthy
   gloo-mesh        | gloo-mesh-redis                | 1/1   | Healthy
   gloo-mesh        | gloo-mesh-ui                   | 1/1   | Healthy
   gloo-mesh        | gloo-telemetry-gateway         | 1/1   | Healthy
   gloo-mesh        | prometheus-server              | 1/1   | Healthy
   gloo-mesh-addons | ext-auth-service               | 1/1   | Healthy
   gloo-mesh-addons | rate-limiter                   | 1/1   | Healthy
   gloo-mesh-addons | redis                          | 1/1   | Healthy
   gloo-mesh        | gloo-telemetry-collector-agent | 3/3   | Healthy
   
   🟢 Mgmt server connectivity to workload agents
   
   Cluster  | Registered | Connected Pod                                   
   cluster1 | true       | gloo-mesh/gloo-mesh-mgmt-server-65bd557b95-v8qq6
   

5. Verify that the gateway proxy service is created and assigned an external IP address. It might take a few minutes for the load balancer to deploy.

   kubectl get svc -n gloo-mesh-gateways
   

   Example output:

   NAME                   TYPE           CLUSTER-IP      EXTERNAL-IP      PORT(S)                                                      AGE
   istio-ingressgateway   LoadBalancer   10.XX.XXX.XXX   35.XXX.XXX.XXX   15021:30826/TCP,80:31257/TCP,443:30673/TCP,15443:30789/TCP   48s
   

6. Optional: Check out the workspace and workspace settings that were created for you. Workspaces help to organize team resources in your cluster, and to isolate Kubernetes and Gloo Gateway resources. Because the default workspace is used for demonstration purposes, it does not isolate any resources, and instead allows all Kubernetes and Gloo Gateway resources in the workspace.

   kubectl get workspace $CLUSTER_NAME -n gloo-mesh -o yaml
   

   kubectl get workspacesettings default -n gloo-mesh -o yaml
   

Next

Deploy sample apps to try out the routing capabilities and traffic policies in Gloo Gateway.

Understand what happened

Find out more information about the Gloo Gateway environment that you set up in this guide.

Gloo Gateway installation: This quick start guide used meshctl to install a minimum deployment of Gloo Gateway for testing purposes, and some optional components are not installed. To learn more about production-level installation options, including advanced configuration options available in the Gloo Gateway Helm chart, see the Setup guide.

Management server and agent: When you installed the Gloo Gateway control plane, a deployment named gloo-mesh-mgmt-server was created to translate and implement your Gloo configurations. Because the glooAgent.enabled: true setting is included in the gloo-gateway install profile, the cluster was also registered to be managed by Gloo. The deployment named gloo-mesh-agent was created to run the Gloo agent as part of the Gloo Gateway data plane.

Relay architecture: In a multicluster setup, the Gloo agent discovers Gloo and Kubernetes resources, such as deployments and services, and sends snapshots of them to the management server for translation and implementation. However, in a single cluster setup, your resources are written directly to the cluster without relay. For more information about relay server-agent communication, see the relay architecture page.

Gateway proxy installation: The gateway proxy installation profiles in this getting started guide were provided within the Gloo Gateway installation Helm chart. However, Gloo Gateway can discover gateway deployments regardless of their installation options. To manually install gateway proxies, see the advanced configuration guides.

Gloo workspace: Gloo workspaces let you organize team resources across Kubernetes namespaces and clusters. In this example, a single workspace is created for everything. Later, as your teams grow, you can create a workspace for each team, to enforce service isolation, set up federation, and even share resources by importing and exporting. You can also change the default workspace by following the Workspace setup guide.