What if you want to share services across workspaces? For example, maybe you want your gateway in Team A’s workspace to route traffic to a frontend service in Team B’s workspace, but not to Team C’s backend services.

You can share resources across workspaces by configuring the workspace settings and the selectors on your services. You have to configure the settings for both workspaces, which help to make sure that you don’t export resources by mistake.

Export to and import from settings

Make sure that your importing and exporting settings match across your workspaces.

  • exportTo must be set in your workspace for each workspace that you want to export resources to.
  • importFrom must be set in the other workspace, and match your workspace that you export from.

You can select your workspaces by using labels and names.

Labels: Use Kubernetes labels to select workspaces for importing or exporting. Each workspace must have the matching label. For example, you might use labels such as team: frontend, app: bookinfo, or env: prod. By using labels, any workspaces that are subsequently added are also selected.

Names: If you want more fine-grained control, you can select workspaces by name. The following types of matching are supported.

  • Exact match, such as name: frontend for a workspace named frontend.
  • Simple regex, such as name: frontend* for any workspaces with names that begin with frontend.

Labels and names together: For more fine-grained control, you can combine labels and names together.

Select resources to share across workspaces

After setting up the workspaces to import from and export to, you can narrow sharing to a particular resource. The following kinds of resources are supported:

  • ApiDoc, a Gloo custom resource that represents the schema of an API that is served by a destination (Kubernetes service or Gloo external service).
  • CloudProvider, a Gloo custom resource that defines the details of a cloud provider where resources like serverless functions exist.
  • ExternalService, a Gloo custom resource for services that run outside the cluster environment, such as in on-prem virtual machines (VMs).
  • RouteTable, a Gloo custom resource that defines routes to the destinations of your apps.
  • Service, a Kubernetes service that typically exposes an app workload like a deployment.
  • VirtualDestination, a Gloo custom resource for services in other clusters.

You can select resources by label, name, namespace, or cluster. For more information, see the API docs.

After importing a resource, Gloo generates subsequent resources like Istio translations in each namespace of the workspace. This way, you can use the imported resources just as other resources in your workspace.

Example scenarios for importing and exporting

For more information about how importing and exporting work, review the following figure, tabbed description, and example configuration file.

Figure: Importing and exporting resources across workspaces.
Figure: Importing and exporting resources across workspaces.
Figure: Importing and exporting resources across workspaces.
Figure: Importing and exporting resources across workspaces.

Example YAML configuration

The following GitHub Gist example configures the settings for three workspaces. You create workspace settings resources in the workload cluster of your choice, as long as that cluster is part of the workspace. For more information, see the API docs.