Set up Gloo Mesh
Securely connect and observe your Istio microservices in your single cluster environment with Gloo Mesh.
Gloo Mesh Enterprise is a service mesh management plane that is based on hardened, open-source projects like Envoy and Istio. With Gloo Mesh, you can unify the configuration, operation, and visibility of service-to-service connectivity across your distributed applications. These apps can run in different virtual machines (VMs) or Kubernetes clusters on premises or in various cloud providers, and even in different service meshes.
You can follow this guide to quickly get started with Gloo Mesh Enterprise. To learn more about the benefits and architecture, see About. To customize your installation with Helm instead, see the advanced installation guide.
Before you begin
Install the following command-line (CLI) tools.
kubectl
, the Kubernetes command line tool. Download thekubectl
version that is within one minor version of the Kubernetes clusters you plan to use.meshctl
, the Solo command line tool.curl -sL https://run.solo.io/meshctl/install | GLOO_MESH_VERSION=v2.7.1 sh - export PATH=$HOME/.gloo-mesh/bin:$PATH
helm
, the Kubernetes package manager.
Create or use an existing Kubernetes or OpenShift 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>
Set your Gloo Mesh Enterprise license key as an environment variable. If you do not have one, contact an account representative. If you prefer to specify license keys in a secret instead, see Licensing. To check your license’s validity, you can run
meshctl license check --key $(echo ${GLOO_MESH_LICENSE_KEY} | base64 -w0)
.export GLOO_MESH_LICENSE_KEY=<license_key>
Install Gloo Mesh Enterprise
Install Gloo Mesh Enterprise in your cluster. This command uses basic profiles to install the management plane components, such as the management server and Prometheus server, and the data plane components, such as the agent, rate limit server, and external auth server, in your cluster.
Verify that your Gloo Mesh Enterprise setup is correctly installed. If not, try debugging the relay connection. Note that this check might take a few seconds to verify that:
- Your Gloo product license is valid and current.
- The Gloo CRDs are installed at the correct version.
- The management plane pods are running and healthy.
meshctl check
Example output:
🟢 License status INFO gloo-mesh enterprise license expiration is 25 Aug 26 10:38 CDT 🟢 CRD version check 🟢 Gloo deployment status Namespace | Name | Ready | Status gloo-mesh | ext-auth-service | 1/1 | Healthy 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-collector-agent | 3/3 | Healthy gloo-mesh | prometheus-server | 1/1 | Healthy gloo-mesh | rate-limiter | 1/1 | Healthy 🟢 Mgmt server connectivity to workload agents Cluster | Registered | Connected Pod test | true | gloo-mesh/gloo-mesh-mgmt-server-558cddbbd7-rf2hv Connected Pod | Clusters gloo-mesh/gloo-mesh-mgmt-server-558cddbbd7-rf2hv | 1
- 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 resources. Because the default workspace is used for demonstration purposes, it does not isolate any resources, and instead allows all Kubernetes and Gloo resources in the workspace.
kubectl get workspace ${CLUSTER_NAME} -n gloo-mesh -o yaml
kubectl get workspacesettings default -n gloo-mesh -o yaml
Deploy Istio
Check whether an Istio control plane already exists.
kubectl get pods -n istio-system
If an istiod
pod exists, such as in this example output, you already installed an Istio control plane. Continue to the next step.
NAME READY STATUS RESTARTS AGE
istiod-b65676555-g2vmr 1/1 Running 0 57s
If no istiod
pod exists, you can use the Solo distribution of Istio to install a service mesh. For more information, check out Solo distributions of Istio. Note that this installs a minimal service mesh setup to get you started. For a more advanced Istio sidecar installation, check out Install Istio service meshes with Helm.
Save the details for version 1.25 of the Solo distribution of Istio.
export ISTIO_VERSION=1.25.2 export ISTIO_IMAGE=${ISTIO_VERSION}-solo export REPO_KEY=e038d180f90a export REPO=us-docker.pkg.dev/gloo-mesh/istio-${REPO_KEY} export HELM_REPO=us-docker.pkg.dev/gloo-mesh/istio-helm-${REPO_KEY}
Install the Istio CRDs.
helm upgrade --install istio-base oci://${HELM_REPO}/base \ -n istio-system \ --version ${ISTIO_IMAGE} \ --create-namespace \ --set defaultRevision=main
Create the
istiod
control plane in your cluster.