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

  1. Install the following command-line (CLI) tools.

    • kubectl, the Kubernetes command line tool. Download the kubectl 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.

  2. 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>

  3. 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

  1. 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.

      meshctl install --profiles gloo-mesh-enterprise-single,ratelimit,extauth \
  --set common.cluster=${CLUSTER_NAME} \
  --set glooMgmtServer.createGlobalWorkspace=true \
  --set licensing.glooMeshLicenseKey=${GLOO_MESH_LICENSE_KEY}
  
      meshctl install --profiles gloo-mesh-enterprise-single-openshift,ratelimit,extauth \
  --set common.cluster=${CLUSTER_NAME} \
  --set glooMgmtServer.createGlobalWorkspace=true \
  --set licensing.glooMeshLicenseKey=${GLOO_MESH_LICENSE_KEY}

  2. 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
  3. 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.

  1. 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}

  2. Install the Istio CRDs.

      helm upgrade --install istio-base oci://${HELM_REPO}/base \
  -n istio-system \
  --version ${ISTIO_IMAGE} \
  --create-namespace \
  --set defaultRevision=main

  3. Create the istiod control plane in your cluster.

  helm upgrade --install istiod oci://${HELM_REPO}/istiod \
  --version ${ISTIO_IMAGE} \
  --namespace istio-system \
  --set global.hub=${REPO} \
  --set global.tag="${ISTIO_VERSION}-solo" \
  --set revision=main \
  --set license.value=${GLOO_MESH_LICENSE_KEY}
  
<p><strong>Note</strong>: If you install Istio 1.23 or earlier, you must use <code>--set profile=openshift</code> instead of the <code>global.platform</code> setting.</p>
  1. Install the CNI plug-in, which is required for using Istio in OpenShift.
      helm upgrade --install istio-cni oci://${HELM_REPO}/cni \
  --namespace kube-system \
  --version ${ISTIO_IMAGE} \
  --set cni.cniBinDir=/var/lib/cni/bin \
  --set cni.cniConfDir=/etc/cni/multus/net.d \
  --set cni.cniConfFileName="istio-cni.conf" \
  --set cni.chained=false \
  --set cni.privileged=true \
  --set global.platform=openshift
  2. Deploy the istiod control plane.
      helm upgrade --install istiod oci://${HELM_REPO}/istiod \
  --version ${ISTIO_IMAGE} \
  --namespace istio-system \
  --set global.hub=${REPO} \
  --set global.tag="${ISTIO_VERSION}-solo" \
  --set revision=main \
  --set global.platform=openshift \
  --set license.value=${GLOO_MESH_LICENSE_KEY}

  1. Verify that the Istio control plane pod is running.

      kubectl get pods -n istio-system

    Example output:

      NAME                          READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
istiod-main-7b96cb895-4nzv9   1/1     Running   0          30s

Next

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

Understand what happened

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

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

Management server and agent: When you installed the Gloo management plane, a deployment named gloo-mesh-mgmt-server was created to translate and implement your Gloo configurations. As you create service mesh configurations, the management components translate your Gloo configurations into Istio resources that are implemented in the service mesh. The management plane also aggregates all of the discovered Istio service mesh components into simplified, internal Gloo custom resources. Additionally, because the glooAgent.enabled: true setting is included in the gloo-gateway-single 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 data plane.

Relay architecture:

When you installed Gloo Mesh Enterprise, the connection between the Gloo management server and agent was secured by using simple TLS with a self-signed TLS certificate that the Gloo management server uses to prove its identity to the Gloo agent. To establish initial trust, the agent uses the relay identity token that you provided during the installation. To learn more about other options to secure the relay connection, see Setup options. 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.

Istio installation: The Istio service mesh in this getting started guide was installed by using Helm. However, Gloo Mesh can discover Istio service meshes regardless of their installation options. For more information, check out the Gloo Mesh Enterprise guides for installing and managing Istio.

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.