Supported policies in Gloo Mesh (Gloo Platform APIs)
Find an overview of supported policies in Gloo Mesh (Gloo Platform APIs) and why you want to use them.
Gloo Mesh (Gloo Platform APIs) supports a variety of policies to ensure network resiliency, traffic control, security, and observability for the microservices in your service mesh. Flip through the cards to learn about what policies are supported, why you want to use them, and what Gloo resource the policy can be applied to. To see an example policy setup, simply follow the links.
| Name | Type | Description | Applied to | Solo distribution of Istio required? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Adaptive request concurrency | Client-side | Dynamically adjust the maximum number of concurrent requests that can be sent to a destination. | Destination | Yes |
| Failover | Client-side | Use a failover policy to determine where to reroute traffic in case of failure. For example, you can set up a failover policy to route traffic from one availability zone or region to another if that zone or region becomes unavailable. | Destination | No |
| Fault injection | Client-side | Test the resilience of your apps by injecting delays and connection failures. With fault injections, you intentionally introduce errors, such as a failure of an upstream dependency to see how your app behaves and if it can recover from such an event. | Route | No |
| Outlier detection | Client-side | Configure Gloo to remove unhealthy destinations from the connection pool, and add the destinations back when they become healthy again. An outlier can be any upstream app instance that is performing differently than other instances that back the Kubernetes service, Gloo virtual destination, or external service. For example, if an app instance responds with a 5xx HTTP error code most of the time, it is excluded from the Gloo load balancing. | Destination | No |
| Retry | Client-side | Use retry settings to specify the maximum number of times a service mesh proxy can attempt to call a service in the mesh after the initial call failed. | Route | No |
| Timeout | Client-side | With timeouts, you can specify how long the service mesh proxy waits for a service or host to respond before it is considered unavailable. | Route | No |
| TCP connection | Client-side | Set up connection pool settings for a TCP destination, such as TCP keepalive. | Destination | No |
| Trim proxy config | Client-side | Trim the number of destinations in the Istio sidecar proxy configuration for your workloads to avoid memory pressure issues. | Workload | No |
| Name | Type | Description | Applied to | Solo distribution of Istio required? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Header manipulation | Client-side | Append or remove HTTP request and response headers at the route level. | Route | No |
| Load balancer and consistent hash | Client-side | Specify how you want Istio to select an upstream service to serve an incoming client request. | Destination | No |
| Mirroring | Client-side | Duplicate outgoing traffic, to test a new app. Mirroring, also referred to as shadowing, can be very useful if you want to send live traffic to a different version of your app to verify the app’s behavior or set up canary testing. | Route | No |
| Rate limiting | Client-side | Control the rate of requests to destinations within the service mesh. With rate limits, you can specify how many requests you want to allow to be passed to a particular service in a certain timeframe. For example, you might want to limit your service to receive only one request per second. | Route or destination | Yes |
| Transformation | Client-side | Alter a request before matching and routing, such as with an Inja header template. For example, you might want to add or remove certain headers from the request or response that is routed in your service mesh. | Route | Yes |
| Name | Type | Description | Applied to | Solo distribution of Istio required? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Access policies | Server-side | Control access for workloads in your service mesh. | Workload or destination | No |
| CORS | Client-side | Enforce client-site access controls with cross-origin resource sharing (CORS). CORS is a browser mechanism that allows a client web app to access resources that are located outside of a specific domain. | Route | No |
| JWT | Client-side | Control access or route traffic based on verified claims in a JSON web token (JWT). Note: Applying a JWT policy to ingress routes requires a Gloo Mesh Gateway license. | Route or destination | Yes |
| External authentication and authorization | Client-side | Set up an external authentication and authorization to protect the workloads in your cluster. For example, you can set up basic, passthrough, API key, OAuth, OPA, or LDAP authentication. | Route or destination | Yes |
| Name | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Certificate Authority options | Client-side | Create a policy for custom CA certificates. |
| Vault | Client-side | Create a policy for Vault-managed certificates. |
You can use the following policies to control traffic through the ingress gateway in north-south scenarios.
To use this feature, you must have a Gloo Mesh Gateway license in addition to your Gloo Mesh (Gloo Platform APIs) license.
| Name | Type | Description | Applied to | Solo distribution of Istio required? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Active healthcheck | Client-side | Use the ingress gateway to periodically check the health of an upstream service in your cluster. | Destination | No |
| Client TLS | Client-side | Enable TLS origination for your ingress gateway so that you can encrypt requests before they are forwarded to HTTPS services in your cluster. | Destination | No |
| CSRF | Client-side | Apply a CSRF filter to the gateway to help prevent cross-site request forgery attacks. A cross-site request forgery attack is a web security vulnerability where the attacker induces an authenticated user to perform an unwanted action on a trusted site. | Route | No |
| DLP | Client-side | Ensure that sensitive data isn’t logged or leaked with Data Loss Prevention (DLP). | Route | Yes |
| HTTP buffer filter | Client-side | Set the maximum request body size that you want to accept for a particular workload in your cluster. | Route | No |
| JWT | Client-side | Control access or route traffic based on verified claims in a JSON web token (JWT). Note: You only need a Gloo Mesh Gateway license to apply JWT policies to ingress routes. For internal mesh traffic, you can apply JWTs to destinations or east-west routes with only a Gloo Mesh (Gloo Platform APIs) license. | Route | Yes |
| Listener connection | Client-side | Configure connection settings between downstream services and a gateway listener. | Listener | No |
| Proxy protocol | Client-side | Preserve connection information such as the client IP address for traffic that goes through your gateway listener. | Listener | No |
| WAF | Client-side | Filter, monitor, and block potentially harmful HTTP traffic with a Web Application Firewall (WAF) policy. | Route | Yes |